Woman in Gold

“Woman in Gold,” directed by Simon Curtis, takes viewers through an emotional experience of what it means to return justice to a family name. It is a story that comes to life on screen—other mediums do not do it justice.The film stars Helen Mirren, who plays the cultured yet hilariously quirky Maria Altmann, a Holocaust survivor from Vienna. It begins with the death of her sister and the discovery of letters attempting to reclaim artwork of the Altmann family that had been stolen by the Nazis during WWII. Among the letters was a single postcard that catalyzed Maria’s decision to bring the Austrian government to court over the loss of her family’s artwork. The postcard contained a picture of the Woman in Gold painted by Gustav Klimt, a painting of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, who also happened to be Maria’s aunt. This picture had been taken off the walls of Maria’s home in Vienna in 1942 and had become the “Mona Lisa” of Austria. Maria, 60 years after the painting had been taken away from her family, decided to regain what was rightfully hers by taking the case to the Austrian court. She recruited J. Randol Schoenberg, played by Ryan Reynolds, a struggling lawyer who is the son of a friend of Maria’s and grandson of the famous composer, Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg takes the job, reluctantly at first, but then becomes somewhat obsessed once he sees this as an opportunity to, in a sense, avenge his ancestors who suffered greatly through and during the Holocaust. Maria and Randy, as she calls him, become an unlikely team and make a claim to the art restitution board in Austria to reclaim the painting.Much of the movie is of Maria and Randy fighting in vain against the restitution board, who are not willing at all to give up the painting that had been in their possession since WWII. They believe the Woman in Gold was part of their national identity. The movie is intertwined with flashbacks of Maria’s life during the beginning of Hitler’s reign and shows a very clear before and after of what her life was like in Vienna.Helen Mirren, as you may already expect, plays her role flawlessly. Her presence on screen demands attention; it may be from the haughtiness of her character’s personality and the cultured yet almost arrogant way she carries herself or from the way the years of pain are etched on her face after the flashbacks of her youth. It was from Mirren’s acting that I found myself crying from happiness and sadness, sometimes at the same time, and left feeling hollow, as though someone had grabbed my innards and ripped them out of my body. To be frank, she played her character perfectly.Now, in terms of Ryan Reynolds, I was genuinely impressed with his acting. I always thought of him as the superhero who flashed his chiseled abs at every chance he got. However, the shy, socially awkward and intelligent lawyer really came through. The perfectly timed coffee spills and awkward pauses in his conversations—long enough to be authentic and not exaggerated—helped make him all the more lovable. However, once Reynolds’s character went through his “awakening” at the Holocaust memorial in Vienna, I was slightly less convinced, and his breakdown seemed forced. His obsessive phase, however, showed one of his strongest acting performance. You can almost see the mad glint in his eyes as he pleaded Maria to keep fighting for what was rightfully hers once she had lost hope. His persistence and determination was not annoying. You could feel the urgency and the desperation at which he tries to juggle his home life with his job and his “obligation” to his ancestors. All in all, watching this movie gave me a new perspective and respect for Ryan Reynold’s acting skills.Overall, “Woman in Gold” is an outstanding film, one I would definitely recommend. It is not the type of movie for someone in a lighthearted mood: rather, it is a deep film that portrays the darker aspects of human nature in a time that people like to gloss over. Expect to cry. Expect to laugh. Expect to be completely torn up in the end, in a way that will leave you both satisfied, unsatisfied and thinking.