There’s a terrible and relentless TV-movie ropiness about this film, combined with a dairy whiff of cheesiness. It deals with a fascinating and important subject but is let down by some embarrassing acting and writing, and it is one that Helen Mirren may have to expunge from any future award-ceremony montages. Woman in Gold is based on the true story of Maria Altmann, an Austrian Jewish woman who escaped the Nazis and found a home in the US, from where, in 1999, as an old woman, she began a sensational legal campaign to reclaim from the Austrian government several paintings stolen from her family by the Nazis – chiefly Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the dazzling woman in gold of the title. Mirren plays Maria as if impersonating Meryl Streep doing an impression of Peter Ustinov’s mum mimicking Heinz Wolff in drag. She goes into adorable/cantankerous/imperious mode, ordering about her troubled American lawyer, blandly and boringly played by Ryan Reynolds, with whom she heads off to Austria in an odd-couple, Philomena-style pairing. She also wears truly ridiculous black contact lenses that make her eyes look like two huge dots – like a character in a Peanuts cartoon. There’s something actor-y and silly about it all, although the flashback sequences in 1930s Austria are competently managed.
