To Maria Altmann, however, the 54 x 54-inch canvas was simply a portrait of beloved Aunt Adele, who died at age 44 long before the Nazis ripped it from the wall of the family home. Maria and her husband made a harrowing flight from Vienna not long after, shown in flashbacks in Simon Curtis’s Woman in Gold. The film itself is a glittering mosaic, flashes of the life that Maria, by this time a widow residing in Pasadena, lived until her death in 2006, snatches of the past, memories steeped in Viennese culture, beauty, and family, the devastation wrought by German anti-Semitism, and an unlikely intersection with the path of a young lawyer, E. Randol Schoenberg, who just happened to be the grandson of the composer who developed the 12-tone row. (The actual E. Randol Schoenberg co-wrote the script.)
Complicated, right? Yet much of the film is a delicately choreographed pas de deux between Maria (Helen Mirren) and Randol (Ryan Reynolds) as they alternately pursue and withdraw from a chase for legal documents and justice that takes them to archives and courtrooms over a 10-year period.
Can Maria claim rightful ownership of the Klimt portrait, which after the war was mounted at Vienna’s Belvidere Museum? What are the rights of families whose art treasures were plundered 50 years before? How long and at what expense should those families persist in their quest for restitution, and is there a point when the struggle should be given up? Is “Austria’s Mona Lisa,” as the Klimt has been called, part of the Austrian people’s heritage?
The issue of art restitution is a thorny one. Woman in Gold takes the position that art taken from families should be restored to families. Others argue that great art belongs to humanity, and efforts to wrest it from safekeeping in museums and public collections represent elitism and, at worst, could result in damage or loss during the transportation and restitution process.
Curtis’s film addresses these issues deftly, though not definitively, through his actors, who are impeccable, with standout performances by Mirren and Reynolds, to cameos by Elizabeth McGovern (Curtis’s wife) as a judge and the incomparable Charles Dance, who can play a cold-hearted attorney like no other actor, as Schoenberg’s inflexible employer.
And what more can be said about Dame Helen? Her uncanny ability to channel her characters illuminates Maria, a frail but indomitable survivor, charming, but not someone you’d want to work for. There is a wistful tenderness to her performance, as though she were adept at juggling eggs on the tip of a pen. There are no false moves or inflection in an accent which is subtle and always right, never bordering on parody as with some well-known performers. Similarly, Reynolds merges with the far less complicated character of the naïve young lawyer who increasingly finds himself pulled into a maelstrom of international proportions. The characters evolve throughout the film, slipping into new understandings, new memories, little epiphanies that flicker like fireworks across faces genuinely surprised by a sense of shared purpose. It is this subtle interplay between the lead actors that most captivates the viewer.
There is a cliché frequently voiced about accounts of World War II: “We must never forget.” But we do, no matter how eloquent the statements of Spielberg, Polanski, and others. Films like Woman in Gold remind us that at the center of history are individual people with stories of breathtaking power, courage, and insight, and relationships of delicate complexity. The stories must be told over and over, an unending source of great art and the deepest sort of collective self-awareness. --Linda Holt
Photo courtesy of www.Klimt.com
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