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| Helen Mirren & Ryan Reynolds (r) star in Woman in Gold |
Reunited, but It Doesn't Feel So Good
Rotten Tomatoes Plot: WOMAN IN GOLD is the remarkable true 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 plucky young lawyer Randy Schoenberg (Ryan Reynolds) she embarks upon a major battle 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.
Evidently Dame Helen can make a bad movie. Mirren and Reynolds are downright dreadful in this cheesy true-life-story. The flashbacks are great; but otherwise, it's a literal borefest. Maria remarks, "This is like a James Bond film." No Maria, it's not... especially when you spend half of it, dishing out silly one-liners like, "Enjoy Disneyland,"and "Unlike Lot's wife, I never looked back." Who knew Mirren was a stand-up comic? Casting Reynolds as a nerd is pure lunacy, and Katie Holmes suddenly looks old and tired. Maria reminds us, "People forget, you see... especially the young." Let's hope so.
Grade: D
