March 31--In "Woman in Gold," a paint-by-numbers account of a gorgeous Klimt and its tortured history of ownership, there's really no other word for what Helen Mirren is doing in certain reaction shots, out of subtle interpretive desperation: mugging. She's mugging. She is a sublimely talented performer, and this is material with fascinating implications, and I doubt there's a moviegoer in the world who doesn't like Helen Mirren. But even the best actors need a director to tell them to tone it down.
Even so, Mirren's the best reason to see this disappointingly shallow chronicle of the woman who waged a lengthy legal battle to regain rightful ownership of Gustav Klimt's "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I," along with other Klimt paintings.
Mirren plays Maria Altmann, the Jewish World War II exile who arrived in America in 1945 with her husband. Altmann's aunt was the Adele immortalized in the gold-flecked 1907 wonder. Seized by the Nazis, along with the wealthy Altmann family's other effects, the painting ended up in Vienna's Belvedere Palace gallery on display after the war, according to the portrait subject's wishes.
But was the Klimt really the subject's to bequeath? Decades later, spurred by the discovery that relatives unsuccessfully sought to reclaim ownership of the paintings, Maria took up the charge, seeking a fair restitution hearing in Austria. Her partner in this expensive legal long shot was Randy Schoenberg, a fledgling Los Angeles attorney played by a wan Ryan Reynolds.
Rebuffed by Belvedere officials, who contended they came by the Klimts honestly and who seem roughly as sympathetic as the Third Reich, Altmann and Schoenberg countered by pursuing the case in the U.S. judicial system, all the way to the Supreme Court. You don't have to know the story's 2006 outcome, ultimately settled in Austrian arbitration, to get that foregone-conclusion feeling from watching director Simon Curtis' film. First-time feature film screenwriter Alexi Kaye Campbell is concerned foremost with narrative clarity. But too often, intriguing matters of provenance and legal maneuvering are ground into simplistic expository nuggets, bread-crumbing the audience through the woods. The relationship between Altmann and Schoenberg, sometimes testy but always loving, plays out like two actors acting, rather than two actors inhabiting a real situation.
And was Reynolds really the guy to play this guy? In repose or in conversation, the actor struggles to convey much of anything as Schoenberg (who is composer Arnold Schoenberg's grandson). Katie Holmes, as Schoenberg's wife, has little to work with; the same goes for Daniel Bruhl as the investigative reporter whose research helped pave the way for the painting's outcome. Other familiar performers come and go, among them Jonathan Pryce (briefly seen as U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist) and Charles Dance (as Schoenberg's gruff employer). The film includes a string of flashbacks detailing the Anschluss of 1938 and the Altmann family members' various fates. As depicted in "Woman in Gold," none of this is particularly difficult to watch. And for any movie whose story lives in the shadow of the Holocaust, a tasteful remove is rarely a sign of dramatic truth.
"Woman in Gold" -- 2 stars
MPAA rating: PG-13 (for some thematic elements and brief strong language)
Running time: 1:50
Opens: Wednesday at Landmark's Century Centre Cinema, opens wide Friday.
mjphillips@tribpub.com
