Woman in Gold (6 out of 10) – Directed by Simon Curtis; Written by Alexi Kaye Campell; Starring Helen Mirren, Ryan Reynolds, Daniel Brühl, Katie Holmes, Tatiana Maslany, Max Irons, Charles Dance, Antje Traue, Elizabeth McGovern; Rated PG-13 for “some thematic elements and brief strong language”, in limited release April 1, 2015.
If you have a heavy movie about Nazis, The Holocaust, and art history, the absolute best way to lighten it up is to give a lot of pithy quips to your leads and then cast people like Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds who know what to do with them. And so in that sense, Woman in Gold does that incredibly well.
The true story of Maria Altman (Mirren), “Woman in Gold” tells the story of her attempt to reclaim works of art stolen from her family when they fled Austria during the Nazi occupation. Complicating things is the fact that the “Woman in Gold” painting is considered the Mona Lisa of Austria, while Maria merely sees it as a portrait of her aunt. And it serves as a reminder of all of the pains of fleeing so many decades later.
But when a chance comes to reclaim her family’s heritage, she decides she is ready to face her demons and return to Austria to fight for these paintings. She is aided by a family friend and young lawyer, played by Ryan Reynolds, whose family were also victims of the Holocaust. The political quickly becomes the personal as old wounds are opened up, and the inconvenient truths about exactly who collaborated with the Nazis and who didn’t, and how that led to Altman’s family’s posessions being seized and eventually ending up in the Austrian national museum.
The film’s message gets a little heavy-handed (anyone who wants to keep these works of art in the gallery where they are now is the same as a Nazi collaborator?) but we’re certainly left feeling for Altman and her case as it goes as high as the US Supreme Court. This courtroom drama is intercut with flashbacks to her harrowing escape. While this gives the film a bit of an uneven feel, it certainly helps raise the stakes and help us as the audience understand how personal the stakes are here.
Ryan Reynolds is the real breakout star here. Mirren does exactly as we would expect her to do, and she puts in another excellent performance. The rapport she and Reynolds have helps lift the film from what is otherwise somewhat boring. Their quips and jokes add just the right touch. But Reynolds is given even more to do, as he begins to connect with his family’s history and internalize the tragedy of the Holocaust, there is a specific scene where it finally hits him and we’re reminded that Ryan Reynolds is not just a comedic actor.
While I can’t imagine a performance more opposite than Deadpool, seeing this made me want to see Reynolds in that role all the more.
While the film is boring at times, uneven in others, and heavy-handed elsewhere, the performances by the two leads makes this worth watching.
6 out of 10