The new movie Woman in Gold tells a story about a painting stolen by the Nazis and the woman who wants it back. Unfortunately, it’s a movie that never finds what it ought to be looking for.
A few years ago in New York, I saw the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer by Gustave Klimt. I stood in front of it for an hour, transfixed by the look in the woman’s eyes, her posture, her clothing and jewelry, the gold leaf and other materials Klimt applied to the canvas. When I left the museum, I knew I’d only begun to take in the depth of this incredible artwork. But you get too little sense of the painting’s richness in Simon Curtis’s Woman in Gold. The movie sees it mostly as property.
The picture tells the surface of an important and true story. In 1998, Maria Altmann (Helen Mirren) lives in Los Angeles. She was born in Vienna in 1916. Adele Bloch-Bauer was her aunt, and Klimt had been hired to do the portrait. At the time, Vienna had a cultured and prosperous Jewish population, people like Freud and composer Arnold Schoenberg. Then came the Nazis. Austria welcomed them; Vienna’s Jews were humiliated and murdered, their property looted. Young Maria Altmann and her husband escaped and made it to the United States. When the movie opens, Maria Altmann owns a small clothing shop, and after all these years, with the help of a young lawyer, she realizes that the painting hanging in a prestigious Vienna museum is in fact hers. The lawyer is a grandson of Schoenberg the composer, so the two are a little like aunt and nephew.
Whatever richness might be found in this story – and there’s plenty – eludes the makers of Woman in Gold. It’s a remarkably uncurious film – there’s not much interest in the painting as art, not much interest in the artist or the family, and not much interest in Maria Altmann either. The movie goes for clichéd Hollywood-style melodrama with a feisty old lady bossing around a young and somewhat naive lawyer. Images of Nazis abusing Viennese Jews will always have an irresistible emotional kick, but the movie coasts on our collective sense of outrage and adds little that’s genuine or felt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4Hs99o03E4
About twenty minutes into the film, I got a sudden feeling of déjà vu, that I’d seen this movie before. Literally I hadn’t, but it’s essentially the same movie as half of Maggie Smith’s films over the last ten years -- the ones like the Downton Abbey series where she has lots of funny quips. And more than that, you can barely tell the difference between Woman in Gold and Philomena, where Judi Dench makes making grumpy, funny comments while she bosses around a young man, except that Philomena uncovers the depth of its characters and doesn’t cop out on cheap sentimentality.
Woman in Gold is a pretty film; Helen Mirren is a terrific actor. But the picture skates on the platitudes of melodrama. Shots of Nazi creeps cutting the sidecurls of young Hasidic men on a Vienna street recall the murderous thuggery, but they’re conventional images when this movie needs to get particular. Mrs. Altmann cares about the painting because it’s a picture of her beloved aunt -- so what’s the bond between the two? What did the painting mean to the family? What’s the sense of loss Mrs. Altmann feels, her sense of violation? The movie takes these things for granted. It presents a generic Holocaust. Also, Austria didn’t give a damn about its Jews then, so why does the country fight tooth and nail to keep a portrait of this rich Jewish woman? The movie closes its eyes when it ought to search.
The first seconds of the film make you think something authentic is going to happen -- the precise, delicate hands of the artist pick up a thin sheet of gold leaf and apply it to the painting. Show more. Get inside this story; otherwise it’s just a stereotypic account of Nazi horror, and all it draws from viewers is the canned reaction we’re used to having over such pictures. That’s bait and switch.
