Earnest, well-intended, and handsomely mounted, but ...

Rating: 6/10 (13 April 2015)

As some of the other lukewarm reviews have pointed out, WIG is generally well acted, strong on production values, and reasonably suspenseful and compelling considering that the ultimate resolution is never much in doubt. However, it's also low-risk, predictable, slowish, and somewhat cliché ridden, in other words, for better or worse, a conventional Hollywood product. More important, we're never sure where the filmmakers' heart really is: with the family plight in the dark year of 1938, or the present, admittedly drier, legal struggle around art reclamation. I'm not familiar enough with the true life facts to comment on accuracy but I suspect some license was used.
Either way it's a beautifully filmed shell of a movie that, with the exception of some of the flashback scenes, somehow lacks much of an inner core, the final surrealistic memory montage in particular, which just didn't work for me. The writers give Miss Mirren a bevy of zingy one-liners which she delivers with her usual aplomb, but otherwise she seems curiously detached, as do most of the principals. Actually I thought the much-maligned Ryan Reynolds as the lawyer was pretty effective as a mechanical, legalistic type without much personality. For me the most interesting characters, arguably the best performances, were the supporting players, especially the Austrian cultural bureaucrats and the various judges and adjudicators.
Not so surprising then that the real star of the film - aside from the Woman in Gold of the portrait herself - is the city of Vienna, here lovingly presented front and center, resplendent in lots of Art Nouveau glory, all awash in, well, gold, also deep brown, dark brown, burnished brown, and off-brown. BTW was the ferris wheel the same one that appeared in The Third Man? But beneath all the surface polish something is missing, though it's not easy to articulate exactly what that something is. Beautiful to look at, WIG is, despite the weighty issues considered, ultimately rather spongy and flat. My six stars are mostly for production and the Vienna scenes.