Have you seen Woman in Gold which has been out on DVD for a bit now? It's about an old Austrian Jew (Helen Mirren) who immigrated to America during the Holocaust and attempts to get her family's original Gustav Klimt paintings back which were stolen by the Nazis and now "belong" to a museum in Austria.
Here are a dozen plus thoughts I had while watching it...
What do you know about art restitution?
• Nothing? It's okay. I didn't either. Helen Mirren will teach us. She speaks most of her lines as if to a small child. In fact, a lot of the characters do. They're constantly explaining the movie's plot and conflicts to us. And after explaining things there's sometimes bits of dialogue like...
Slow down! You can explain everything to me over lunch."
ARGH. But he already explained everything to you. Coddling screenplays like this make me batty.
• Katie Holmes has a really useless part in this movie as Ryan Reynolds's wife. She shows up every 20 minutes or so to either a) pat Ryan on the shoulder or b) express brief concern at how he's obsessed with this art restitution thing or c) gaze at him adorably. ACTING!
• Charles Dance (The Imitation Game and countless other movies) is also in this movie as Ryan Reynold's boss. Every time I see him in a movie my mind jumps to that rumor in the 80s that Meryl Streep & Tracey Ullman hated him on the set of Plenty.
• This is actually really a fascinating topic for a movie so they can get away with a lot and still keep you interested. The flashbacks to the past are really inelegantly introduced... usually by Helen Mirren looking at a photo. Cue: memory! Sometimes the memories stare right back at her or are shown within the present. This plays a bit cheesy though if more confidently or consistently handles it might be stylish or bold.
• Daniel Brühl (always welcome) hails Helen & Ryan down in Vienna when they come for a Restitution Conference. (Somehow he already knows who they are and just walks right up like 'Hey, We're All Actors in this Movie. Let's Do Our Scene!') He's a Walking Exposition Machine to help them through Viennese politics and psychology. Helen likes him immediatly but Ryan doesn't trust him. (Perhaps he's seen "Stolz der Nation"?)
• Helen Mirren cups her hair/wig a lot in this movie. Apparently you cannot make it as an actress past 60 if you are not constantly touching at your iconic face (see also: Meryl Streep and Jessica Lange) to remind people how awesome it is. I thought about counting how many times but quickly forgot because....
this scene plays like comedy, like he'll spill the coffee on himself. Haha what a klutz. But then he doesn't.
• ...Ryan Reynolds kept hogging the movie. He is not a lawyer. He just plays one in the movies. We know this so why is the movie making efforts to schlub him down so we don't get distracted by his hunkiness? Ill fitting ugly suits. There's even a brief reference to how handsome he is, so why pretend otherwise? This is a movie. Embrace the star glamour filmmakers, because clearly you're not going for gritty realism! Or even an ACTING movie since you hired Ryan & Katie, two of the blandest around.
• Late in the movie Katie sports one of the fakest pregnancy bellies I've ever seen. What shape is that child?
• It seems like whole huge scenes are missing. At one point we walk into a room and Ryan & Helen have been warned that the records they're looking for will be nearly impossible to find. We get a 'good luck you'll need it' type intro to a shot of a room with infinite boxes and shelves and such. Cut to: Next scene. They're perusing all the documents they needed trying to come up with their legal game plan. Finding records in Austria is apparently the easiest thing ever!
• The German actor playing Helen's husband Fritz in flashback is ridiculously good looking. (IMDb trip: He's not German. That's Max Irons. LOL. Jeremy's son! I have no excuse for not realizing this.)
• But look at the framing! It's awful. I did not edit or crop that photo. That's the actual frame from a key scene at their wedding. It's not even from a zoom in. That's just how theyr'e photographed. Why are the director and cinematographer so close to the actors that they're cutting off his head at the eyebrows and her at the chin? Jesus Christ. Back up a little. Tatiana and Max can act and the camera will read their emotions if you're a few inches further back. I PROMISE YOU. The movie is also super overlit in some scenes which makes it look like a made for television movie at times.
• MVP: Tatiana Maslany. She's so convincing as both a native German and, importantly, as a younger version of Helen Mirren that I had to race to IMDb afterwards to learn more about her (I've seen a handful of episodes of Orphan Black in which she is a technical virtuouso but I knew nothing about her otherwise). Turns out she is from Canada but speaks at least three languages fluently: German, English, and French. This obviously accounts for her ease with accents and her phenomenal vocal range. Not only do her clones on that show have different voices but they also have different national origin and accents.
• In fact, Tatiana is so good in this that I kept wishing the other scenes were flash-forwards and we could just mostly spend the movie with her. The present means expository scenes. Dame Helen being sassy (which she can do in her sleep just like Dench & Smith). And Mr and Mrs Ryan-Katie Blanderson.
• Was this movie wholly funded by the Neue Gallery? It's like a 2 hour teaser saying 'you really wanna see this painting in person. And there's only one place you can see it!'
• I've always love this painting...
• As the credits were scrolling I realized Moritz Bleibtreu (Run Lola Run, Das Experiment, and more) was playing the artist Gustav Klimt. No fair to cast him as the artist of the work that the movie is about and then barely show him? Free Bleibtreu! Free Bleibtreu!
• This movie is not very good. The end.