This photo provided by The Weinstein Company shows, Helen Mirren, left, and Ryan Reynolds, in a scene from the film, "Woman in Gold."Robert Viglasky/The Associated Press
What might the real woman in gold have made of Woman in Gold?
More than a century ago, Adele Bloch-Bauer was a rebel, a socialist socialite who, with her industrialist husband, hosted a popular salon that championed Vienna's avant-garde. Gustav Klimt painted her portrait twice, and likely bedded her even more. Decades later the portraits, looted by the Nazis, became the centre of a landmark art-restitution case – and now, of a Hollywood film based on the case.
In Woman in Gold, Helen Mirren plays Adele's flinty, frisky niece, Maria Altmann, who teams with the callow and hungry lawyer Randol Schoenberg (Ryan Reynolds) to become an "odd couple" David against the Goliath of the Austrian government.
Beset by portentous dialogue and a clockwork screenplay, Mirren and Reynolds (and Canada's Tatiana Maslany, who radiates in her scenes as the newlywed Maria) breathe what life they can into their cardboard roles. Director Simon Curtis milks the predictable drama, thrills and heartache of the Holocaust-era story, but it's a paint-by-numbers triumph, a copy of something we've seen many times before.
Simon Houpt