nothin “Woman in Gold” Tells An Unexpected Story | New Haven Independent

Woman in Gold” Tells An Unexpected Story

BBC Films

The film’s stars, Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds.

Never mind that The Woman in Gold,” Gustav Klimt’s portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer is really a third-rate painting far more decorative and oohed-and-ahhed over for its gold leaf than for its perceptiveness.

Never mind that the eponymous movie is a second-rate Holocaust film: few surprises await the viewer in the depiction of the murderous Nazis, the happy clapping of the Austrians as the storm troopers goose-step their way into Vienna, the ongoing guilt and low-grade trauma of those who were able to flee.

That’s because the story, one of years of legal wrangling by Maria Altmann (Helen Mirren) to return her family’s Gustav Klimt paintings looted by the Nazis, turns out to be more than a lesson in art restitution. Instead, it’s one of a powerful, sentimental Holocaust education for the younger generation, personified by Altmann’s young, inexperienced lawyer Randol Schoenberg (Ryan Reynolds).

BBC Films

Although Schoenberg is a grandson of another elegant and artistically accomplished Viennese family, he’s become a total Los Angeleno by the beginning of the film, as removed from the Holocaust the gloomy, heavy-facaded cinematic weather of Anschluss, Vienna as the bright California sunshine in which the film is shot. That is, until the case for the restitution of Altman’s Aunt Adele’s 1907 portrait comes to him fortuitously through his mom, a friend of Altmann’s.

The funeral at which Maria and the young lawyer’s mom connect in the film’s opening sequences feels very much like the opening of a crime thriller, where the protagonists eye each other in the crowd and the road to vengeance or justice is telegraphed. This is no accident: Altmann’s desire to have some justice for her family and for Aunt Adele, whom she loved, drives the first half of the film.

The reluctant young Schoenberg is slowly drawn into a knowledge of the past by Altmann’s elegant dignity and her sense that justice must finally be done, even after six decades.

There are obstacles: after the pair’s first trip to Vienna, it seems that the good Austrians have legally stymied the effort and Altmann is ready to give up. We see why through a series of effective flashbacks: the traumatizing looting of her family’s art by the Nazis and her and her young husband’s harrowing last-minute escape from a war zone. She’s on the threshold of having tried but reached the moment to put the past behind her.

Then, on the way to the airport to return to L.A., the two stop at the Vienna Holocaust Memorial, a bunker of concrete blocks eerily in the shape of a crematorium inscribed with the names of the dozens of concentration and labor camps of the Third Reich. Enter the film’s major pivot: Schoenberg puts his hand on the one inscribed with Treblinka,” where his great-grandparents were exterminated.

Having been lawyerly, subdued, indulgent of Mirren’s quirky yet demanding Altmann but essentially passive himself, he’s overcome with such emotion that he begs Altmann’s indulgence to go use the bathroom. There, he breaks into heart-wrenching weeping and pounding the marble stall.

It’s a credit to the filmmakers’ discretion that there’s little direct explication of what has just happened. The moment is kept personal mysterious, almost spiritual: when the pair return to L.A., Schoenberg quits his job — his snazzy legal firm won’t let him waste any more time on the case — and devotes himself to overcoming the huge legal hurdles, including appearing a nervous rookie in front of the U.S. Supreme Court to make his case.

Why? When Schoenberg’s worried young wife asks why he’s quit his job, gone into debt, risked their future for this one case, all he says is: Something happened out there in Austria.”

It’s as if Austria” were not a place, but a condition, or a responsibility, or, better yet, a legal dybbuk that has entered him and won’t give him peace until steps are taken. He takes those steps and, of course, he’s victorious: he is now carrying the burden of remembering.

ROBERT VIGLASKY/THE WEINSTEIN COMPANY

Tatiana Maslany as a young Altmann.

Only it’s not a burden, it’s a kind of trophy, a fulfillment of Maria’s promise that her father and mother asked of her at the heart-wrenching moment, told earlier in the film in flashback, when she is leaving them to escape. Remember us. Altmann has turned remembering into action, or as she puts it in one of the perhaps too many aphoristic, yet quietly charged lines the film gives her, The past is asking something of the present.”

The film is, of course, not without other flaws, including the Supreme Court scene where Reynolds, in the grip of the dybbuk or not enough sleep, totally zones out and is forgiven by the avuncular justices.

Or when the character played by millionaire collector Ronald Lauder, who will ultimately buy the Woman in Gold” for $135 million and display it in his gallery in New York, tries to cajole Altmann into firing her young lawyer for more experienced art restitution counsel, and yet she sticks by him.

Oh well. Hollywood’s most fundamental archetype is how the lone person or the little people — even well-heeled little people” like these Viennese accented Angelenos who now reside in Beverly Hills or Santa Monica — through grit and belief in themselves, and a little luck, overcome the most impossible odds. That’s this film.

Klimt’s “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer.”

It might be a cliche, but it’s a great one, and it surely had me in cathartic tears.

Woman In Gold is showing this week at the Criteron Cinemas downtown.

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