- Alan Alda and Britt Robertson in The Longest Ride
I never would have expected that modern art and the plight of Austria’s secularized Jews factor crucially in a couple of “feel-good” pictures currently in theaters: the docudrama Woman in Gold and the Nicholas Sparks adaptation The Longest Ride. In the first, Helen Mirren plays Maria Altmann, an LA-based Austrian immigrant who successfully sued the Austrian government in the late 1990s to reclaim several Gustav Klimt paintings that the Nazis had taken illegally from her family six decades earlier. In the second, Oona Chaplin (daughter of Geraldine and granddaughter of Charlie) plays an Austrian Jew who emigrates to North Carolina in the late 1930s and later becomes a collector of modern art. Both films are undeniably treacly, trading in gross simplifications and telling viewers exactly what to think and feel at every moment. I find Longest Ride the more tolerable of the two—in large part because it acknowledges its pedigree as genre entertainment, rather than trying to pass itself off as a history lesson—though that’s not to say it’s any less naive about Jews or modern art.
In Woman in Gold, modern art is emblematic of a lost tradition, one the filmmakers show little interest in exploring. The Longest Ride also invokes modern art, ironically, to conservative ends, as Chaplin’s character begins collecting art to make up for her unfulfilled desire to have children. Unlike Gold, however, the film considers how art affects individuals’ spiritual development as well as society as a whole. Chaplin responds to modern painting as a form of pure emotional expression—it’s just the love she shares with her husband, played as a young man by Jack Huston. Playing the husband as an old widower, Alan Alda relates to a young art student (Britt Robertson) how his wife found deep satisfaction in viewing paintings and in patronizing painters. It’s some of the most tender acting I’ve seen from Alda, who manages to make the contrived material sound practically natural. (In fact everyone onscreen acquits him- or herself surprisingly well. George Tillman Jr., whose previous directorial credits include Soul Food and the Biggie Smalls biopic Notorious, really seems to care about actors, allowing every speaking performer at least one little personal inflection.)
