The Weekend Review: Woman in Gold

In which I review a selection of last weekend's entertainment.

It's been a while since The Weekend Review was about something that didn't just come out in the last week.  Seriously, you'd have to go back to mid-February when I reviewed Tusk.  Everything else was either something that hit theaters, Netflix or the internet right then and there (or was at least given a wide release in the US).  It's kind of refreshing, then, to reach back even a few weeks to something that isn't fresh off the press (even if it's still cloying to predominantly Avenged theaters).

When her sister dies, Maria Altmann - an elderly Holocaust survivor - discovers letters among her effects that reveal her sister's failed attempts to reclaim family portraits from the Austrian government that were stolen from them by the Nazis.  Wanting no more than to be reunited with her aunt Adele - Gustov Klimpt's famed "woman in gold" - she seeks the reluctant help of a young lawyer to take the Austrian government to court.

When Becky told me that she wanted to see this movie, I struggled to form a deeper opinion on the matter than the stillborn indifference of watching a mid-year period drama.  It had a good cast and a solid premise, but good dramas are never released this close to blockbuster season.  They're either released during the late fall prestige season (like Birdman) or get pushed back until January if the competition that year is especially fierce (like Shutter Island).  They aren't unloaded on the public in April.

Maybe that's why I was so impressed with it.  It was a shockingly well-made drama whose producers had confidence enough in the film to release it at a time when it wasn't going to be dismissed as cloying Oscar-bait.  Woman in Gold is not going to tear up this year's Academy Awards - and probably never was - but it will most certainly prove to be a far more confident and capable story than many that stand a reasonable chance to.

So many "high end dramas" prove to just be one thing: one good performance, one good director, one good script, one good scene.  These are the Gravities and Theory of Everythings of the world.  Oftentimes these are enough to make it worth watching and enough to make off with a few awards.  But that's not the kind of film that Woman in Gold is.

Woman in Gold is not just one thing: but a confluence of quality that is shockingly rare in its genre.  It has a more than capable cast between Hellen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds.  It's deftly helmed by My Week with Marilyn's Simon Curtis, who portrays the weight of the narrative without giving into its sentimentality.  Its surprisingly nuanced narrative is ably penned by freshman screenwriter Alexi Campbell.  So while more prestigious films might decidedly beat it out on any one of these fronts, it is a more balanced and more resilient film on the whole for its evenly capable execution.

The film has an organically non-linear narrative that uniquely feels both natural and necessary.  Whereas most films that attempt the same structural sleight-of-hand do so in order to mask the inequities of anemic writing, Woman in Gold falls in the tradition of The Imitation Game.  Its decades-spanning narrative is resolutely focused on the present, slipping into flashback only when it reveals something new about the characters in precisely chosen moments.

Rather than competing with one another for importance, past and present sequences augment each other in ways that a more traditionally plotted narrative could not.  The primary narrative being rooted in the present keeps the focus on what's most important: restitution and reunion.  The interspersed scenes set in the past elaborate on precisely why they're important: on what was really stolen from Maria - not a painting, but the very memory of those dear to her.

So if you find yourself with time on your hands and money in your pocket this weekend, I would urge you to check out Woman in Gold before it rotates out of theaters.  It is an exceptional drama that can never hope to achieve the notoriety that it deserves.

Rating:  7.5/10

Buy on BluRay:  Yes.

So what is your favorite WWII drama?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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