THERE comes a film sometimes that is so well wrought and elegant and engaging that one forgets the silent history or ignores the back stories about wealth and bigotry. That film is Woman in Gold.
The charm and curiosity of the film is that we are all too familiar with the title, which refers to a painting showing a mysterious and lovely woman, her dress gold-leafed in some areas. The painter is no less than Gustav Klimt and the work, a grand example of the Vienna Secessionist movement, composed of artists who broke away from what was then dominant traditional way of panting. The portrait done in 1907 is also known as The Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. Another painting would be done later, titled not surprisingly Adele Bloch-Bauer II.
“Adele,” however, was not just any woman. She was a society lady, a doyenne in many tea parties and grand banquets attended the intellectuals of fin-de-siecle Vienna. Name them, for they were all in the living room of the imposing apartment of the Bloch-Bauer: Freud, Mahler, etc. Adele was rich and, in some accounts, imbued with a frailty and delicate constitution that added to her allure and mystique. She died young in 1925.
Adele was not just any Viennese. She was a Jew and most of the intellectuals coming to her home were Jews. Prominent Jews in business and in arts and culture. But this was Austria and in the 1930s, the Nazis were on the rise. An art student who was refused entry into the artistic circle of Vienna was leading the new movement, and his name was Hitler.
Adele would never see her home and the arts collection of her family pillaged and looted. The art theft included the famous portrait of Adele in oil, silver and gold.
Flash forward to the 1990s. Art restitution was happening in Austria. The Nazis are gone, or so we think. The film winks at us at this point.
Adele, or the Woman in Gold, at this point ceases to be just another portrait from the gilded past. There is this person, you see, and her name is Maria Atlmann and Adele is her aunt, a dear aunt who used to comb her hair. But Maria is now in America, living cozily in one of the wealthy enclaves of Los Angeles. Far from Vienna and the Austria of her childhood, Maria runs a shop and lives in a lovely bungalow, the front looking like some meadows from coloring books. The only sign of her past are the many bric-a-brac on the long commode in the living room.
Maria is claiming ownership of the painting of Klimt. She seeks the help of the son of a family friend, who happens to be a young lawyer, right at the time of her sister’s demise.
Klimt ceases to be a historical figure in art. Maria shared a space with the woman this great painter evoked in what Maria described as a “magnificent.” Enters Andy Schoenberg, a young lawyer trying to find his place in the legal sun.
We soon find out that he is the great-grandson of Arnold Schoenberg, considered to be one of the most influential minds in 20th-century music. Talk about name-dropping! And yet, the characters are not dropping names; they do belong to a lineage that is as golden as the woman in the frame.
Piquant is the charm of Woman in Gold, the film, that we find ourselves traveling back in time and truly understanding—or that is how we feel all throughout the film—Maria Altmann and her escape from Nazi Austria. She does not find peace, though, in the new world because the memories of her childhood are just as painful as they are fabulous.
The film employs flashbacks when Maria was a young girl but this device, instead of slowing the narrative, fleshes for us the present in the person of Maria. As Andy Schoenberg, Ryan Reynolds walks with a gait that is not that of a winner. When at last he triumphs in his aim to restore what is duly an old woman’s property, we cheer and notice how brazenly handsome this lawyer is. When he cries out of a conflicted feeling about this Austrian past, we understand the sorrow of those who were uprooted by racism and evil designs. Reynolds’s Schoenberg seems not conscious also of his heritage.
Helen Mirren is Maria Altmann in the brave new world who, however, seems suffused with sadness for the past that did not pass by but was something she left behind. It is a glorious joy watching Mirren play the character of a Jewish woman whose connection to the very important and expensive Klimt painting is through kinship and memory and not through cunning and economics. Stubborn and sweet, Mirren’s Maria never sentimentalizes the past because it is something she owns.
The film does not also sentimentalize the issues of Nazism and the Jewish fate. Outside the building where the art restitution committee discusses the details of art without clarifying the Nazi looting of Europe, Maria is accosted by a man who tells her not everything is about the holocaust.
John Irving in his novel, The World According to Garp, calls Vienna “artistic and contemplative, with real sadness and majesty.” But Garp would call Vienna tired, a coffin. Garp would note how there is no more Klimt in Vienna.
Indeed, the film does not hide its contempt for the city—and a society that tries to restore what it has lost but, at the same time, negates the remembrance of its past. As Maria puts it, not everyone hated the Nazi, some of these people welcomed them and even threw flowers at them.
Schoenberg, Freud, Mahler, the buildings that remain on the same streets, then the Klimts—this film called Woman in Gold proves that memory is seductive. Mirren in her performance ushers us to a past full of sadness and majesty. Those two feelings make this film, for all the hidden texts about the wealth of Jews and the sadness of poor people in a rich society, worth our viewing of a history not our own, and thinking of the lessons of stories from years ago to make it our own.
Woman in Gold is directed by Simon Curtis (My Week With Marilyn) and written by Alexi Kaye Campbell. The film also stars Daniel Bruhl and Tatiana Maslany, the latter playing the young Maria, her face bearing an uncanny resemblance to Mirren playing the older Maria.
As memories go, this film brings back golden memories when Helen Mirren blew kisses toward my direction when I shouted “Bravo!” as she stepped out of the Audi car during the red carpet reception in this year’s Tokyo International Film Festival. Woman in Gold had a special screening in that festival.