Sunday Review: Woman in Gold

The past revisited and restored?

By Jonathan Price

The 2015 film Woman in Gold (directed by Simon Curtis) is based on a true story and retells it with some detail, intelligence, and passion. At the center of the story is an actual portrait by an Austrian painter of the early twentieth century, Gustav Klimt, of a friend and patron, Adele Bloch-Bauer, surrounded by ornamentation in shimmering gold.
    When the story begins, the painting is in a museum in Vienna, but the niece of Adele, Maria Altman (played by Helen Mirren) claims the painting is due her as an inheritance. The film retraces Maria’s legal efforts to retrieve it from the Austrian museum and government, and the pain and memories these efforts cause her.

Adele Bloch-Bauer I

    Adele Bloch-Bauer I shows a woman in a decorative design of gold with many other iconographic symbols, to the point where the decoration seems to overwhelm the mysterious woman and expand into the painting’s background, while transforming her into a goddess or an object of worship. (It’s “Adele Bloch-Bauer I” because Klimt named it that and did a second portrait of her in a different, less arresting style. It’s called “Woman in Gold” by the Belvedere art museum, the Vienna museum where it is kept, making it more universal but perhaps also obscuring its roots.) The painting is now world famous and, as the film has it, a refrigerator magnet icon that somehow symbolizes the Secession art movement, a Byzantine past, Klimt, and Austria itself. Adele and her husband, from a tight-knit, successful Viennese Jewish family, are friends and patrons of Klimt, himself somewhat of a Bohemian figure,

but his artistry and life are soon eclipsed in the film by the sufferings of the Bloch-Bauers and Vienna’s Jews when the Nazis don’t so much invade as assume power.
    The painting, along with others, was acquired by the government of Austria after the Anschluss, or union, of Austria and Germany in 1938. The joining of Austria and Germany had an 80% approval rating in Austria when it was initially suggested by Hitler. This may have been a celebratory time in Vienna, but it inaugurated a painful time for Vienna’s Jews, and this corner of the Holocaust is one of the film’s centers. In flashbacks and cross-cuttings to that era we see Maria and her family observing Jews forced to wash sidewalks and be publicly humiliated. Swastika-draped officials take over her family’s apartment, placing the family in effect under house arrest, and confiscate their paintings and jewels because of an alleged tax evasion by Maria’s father.

    Painful as these scenes are, they are essentially fleeting, as most of the film is set in the recent present with Maria and her lawyer Randol Schoenberg’s struggle to assert her ownership of the painting (along with other Klimts owned by her uncle). The lawyer (played by Ryan Renolds), also Jewish and with his own claim to Austrian nobility through his famous relative the composer Anton Schoenberg, is reluctant at first to take on the case and wonders in the California of the 1990s (Maria lives in California) why Maria seems so obsessed with events of “50 years ago.” But he soon discovers, via Google, that the Klimt painting may be worth $130 million dollars. The key story and the film’s emotional center is in the growing understanding and respect between Maria and Randol. She sees he is dogged and imaginative in his pursuit of her (and her family’s) rights, and he is so moved when he goes to Vienna and visits the tomblike Holocaust memorial that he retreats to a men’s room to vomit. The closeness that grows between them is not only the result of his tragic recognition of the Holocaust’s suffering but of their shared sense during the legal battle that their Austrian opponents are disingenuous and self-serving – or that is certainly the black-white moral view of the film. The Austrian art director of the Belvedere is not interested in any accommodation (e.g., recognition of Altman’s rights to the painting in exchange for an extended loan to the Belvedere), until he loses the case.
    Maria sticks by her young, somewhat inexperienced, lawyer with shallow pockets even when she is offered the financial aid and vast legal services of the Estee Lauder fortune, whose heir later founded a museum on New York’s 5th Avenue to permanently display the Klimt. Lauder, at a luncheon, offers his highly trained, well-respected lawyer, whom he suggests she should prefer to a schoolboy. Maria says she’ll go with her boy. Maria’s and Randol’s growing trust and affection is at the film’s center. Helen Mirren’s Maria is distinguished by girlishly rearranging her hair several times throughout the film and by her arch and often comic responses; she has a sense of humor that often borders on the sarcastic. But her character is also modest, really expecting little more initially than a chance to replace her aging dishwasher. She is confident, but clearly haunted by memories of her Viennese past and the painful events which led to her lifelong exile.
    The film is stuck with a plot dilemma. For all the suspense and inherent drama of a legal case that pits a lone individual against history and the vast resources of a sovereign government, restoring the paintings cannot bring back the past, cannot restore the dead aunt (Adele, with a history of medical problems, died young, years before the Anschluss) or the suffering parents left behind in Vienna, or the thousands of Jews memorialized in the Holocaust monument in Vienna and sent to their deaths in a variety of camps. This is, alas, the ultimate truth of all such legal cases. However, the two principals do not simply take the money and run. Maria sells the Klimts to a museum in New York where they can regularly be seen by the public, and donates much of her gain to charity; Randol also designates a significant portion of his fees to charitable purposes.
    Still missing from this account is some sense of what the artwork itself represents and the lively world of fin-de-siècle Vienna, its Jews (among whom numbered Sigmund Freud), and the bohemian art milieu of Gustav Klimt, many of whose paintings featured nudes, and who for years dressed in a unisex fashion along with his lover, as a comment on what they considered impractical public standards of dress. Also not shown or mentioned are Klimt’s beautiful paintings of parks and castles and trees, which rival those of the Post-Impressionists for color and intensity and imagination. But no film can do everything.

Copyright © 2015 by Jonathan Price