5/10

A woman’s dark and tragic past is opened when she seeks the possession most valuable to her; the painting of The “Woman In Gold”. Director Simon Curtis (My Week With Marilyn) gives us the story of one woman’s journey to reclaim her heritage and seek justice for what happened to her family. Sixty years after she fled Vienna during World War II, an elderly Jewish woman, Maria Altmann (Helen Mirren), starts her journey to retrieve family possessions seized by the Nazis. Among them Klimt’s famous painting ‘Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I’. Together with her inexperienced but driven young lawyer Randy Schoenberg (Ryan Reynolds), she embarks upon a major lawsuit which takes them all the way to the heart of the Austrian establishment and the U.S. Supreme Court, and forces her to confront difficult truths about the past along the way. “Woman In Gold” is pushed as high as it is because of it’s validating performances from a well rounded cast that try hard, but fall just a little short when given the tasks of overcoming such technical mistakes. The film feels like it is cut into two halves with the first hour of the movie feeling very dull and stretched in place over a span of one week. The remaining forty minutes feels like it is sped along too fast while trying to cover years of the back and forth process between both sides fighting for the painting. I found the second half of the film to be more enjoyable because it plays like an entertaining film, and definitely one that the audiences deserve for such a harrowing tale. What truly perplexes me about the film is the lack of storytelling to make audience members who know nothing of Altmann and her family understand what makes her story so compelling. Not to sound insensitive, but millions of Jewish families had their priceless possessions stolen during World War II (As seen in the better film, “The Monuments Men”), but what happened to her family as a result of the invasion of the Nazis? We get nothing of any kind of torture or embarassment for these characters, so there was nothing other than the stealing of art that drew me to the story. I’m not saying that Altmann’s story isn’t interesting, actually quite the opposite. There is so much to the story that the filmmakers left out that it shows the real holes in the story’s pacing. Another big problem with the movie is the frame editing that totally took me out of the film twice. I’m not saying it isn’t hard to stay true to a movie set in 1998 but film it in 2014, but are you telling me that the editors totally missed two very big issues with the script’s setting? The first is seeing a few people walking by using smart phones. Usually anyone who walks by a camera is a paid extra, so how was this issue missed in post production? Another one is so big that i don’t know how anyone could be OK with it. While driving down the Los Angeles Strip during the film’s one hour mark, we notice a “Guardians of the Galaxy” poster on the left side of the road. It’s not even like this was a distant poster, as it’s about forty feet in front of our protagonists vehicle. It’s a shame that the film’s crew apparently didn’t care as much about this sloppy and forgettable drebbel. Mirren is fantastic as usual. As one of the best leading ladies in the game today, she can act her way out of a paper bag. The grandmother-grandson esque feel between her and Reynolds is what really makes their chemistry work. The true transformation of the film is in that of Reynolds, as he only takes the case for money, but is then changed immensly when he understands just how much of his family’s heritage is involved in this tragedy. I wish the first half of the film took more time with Altmann’s story, and it’s because of that why i rated the film so low. The two seperate speeds just doesn’t do it for a film that needs every aspect told. Coming out of the film, i felt like i learned more in the post-film text that followed the feature than i did with the previous 100 minutes. “Woman In Gold” isn’t a terrible movie, it’s just terribly made. When flashbacks to the past show just how dull the pacing of the current storyline is going, you’ve got yourself a real problem here.