Art and artifice

Rating: 8/10 (13 April 2015)

The title suggests this is going to be a "Woman's Picture" - and it is. But a high-quality woman's picture. And an uplifting true-life story.
Maria Altmann is feisty and tetchy and magnificently determined. Mirren plays her in a slight twist on her portrayal of Elizabeth II, with a piled-on Austrian accent (no jokes about the Queen's Teutonic pedigree, if you please); I found myself wondering if Meryl Streep had been approached for the role, accents being very much her thing. Reynolds does a nice turn as the nerdy but equally resolute lawyer, the kind of role Gregory Peck made his name in.
The movie has a sort of 'sheen' to it, which occasionally makes it seem a tad schmaltzy, and the flashbacks to the gilded glamour of pre-war Vienna are definitely over-polished. As in George Clooney's THE MONUMENTS MEN, the theft of paintings is almost allowed to eclipse the true horrors of what the Nazis did to Europe's Jews. The intransigence of today's Austrian art custodians - and its legal system - provides a neatly different chill.
The scenes I liked most were those (three of them) in which past and present are allowed to meld together. This device was briefly and subtly used in the Merchant-Ivory HEAT AND DUST (1983). It's less subtly employed here, but it helps to make the film memorable. WOMAN IN GOLD is a beguiling work of art and artifice, handsomely framed.