True story alert: Helen Mirren plays Maria Altmann, a Viennese-born resident of Los Angeles, who in 1998 battled the Austrian authorities for ownership of the eponymous Klimt painting, stolen from her Jewish family by the Nazis. Believe it or not, the attorney who helped her was the grandson of the composer Arnold Schoenberg. Woman in Gold is a soft-centred plain-folks-prevail heartwarmer with a blandly educational undertow, and with flashbacks to an escape from Nazi Austria that are crowd-pleasing rather than nail-biting.
There are few surprises here, except that Ryan Reynolds, as Randy Schoenberg (which strikes me as a pretty damn rock’n’roll name, wouldn’t you say?) is rather winning as a self-deprecating but determined hero in beige windcheaters. It won’t do the film any harm at the box office that Helen Mirren twinkles indomitably. She’s as good as ever, but really – of all the things you want to see Dame Helen doing indomitably, twinkling isn’t among them.
