Woman in Gold (2015)

Here is a film that arrives with its credentials in order: a true story of Nazi looting, an elderly survivor, a Supreme Court case, and Helen Mirren in sensible spectacles. It is the kind of prestige drama that British producers assemble the way a caterer assembles a cold buffet, with every item recognizable and nothing requiring a second look. The moral stakes are unimpeachable. The filmmaking is not. One sits through it the way one sits through a very long museum wall text.

On the matter of social consciousness, the picture is largely content to be a period piece about persecution suffered rather than a statement about persecution as a living theme. The Jewish family at its center is rendered as historical tragedy, not as a launching point for contemporary racial reckoning. The cast is white and European throughout, and the Jewish characters are played by performers who are not Jewish, a choice the film regards as unremarkable. Maria Altmann's stubbornness against a national bureaucracy is admirable but reads as a legal quest, not a gender argument. There is no romance outside heterosexuality, no environmental concern, no attention to body or mind. The antagonist is a gallery and a government, which the film treats as a moral wrong rather than a symptom of any economic order.

Where the picture does lean forward is in the arbitration chamber, where Ryan Reynolds delivers a closing speech about the meaning of restitution that is earnest, well-intentioned, and roughly four minutes longer than it needs to be. The screenplay also reshapes the historical record in the standard biopic manner, most notably in the invented courtroom sympathies of the Chief Justice, though these are conveniences of storytelling, not ideology. What remains is a respectable, muted, faintly wearying film that believes decency is sufficient and never asks whether decency is enough.