Truth is indeed stranger than fiction, but fiction also has the power of taking surprising, riveting true stories and flattening them into overly familiar tales. Which brings us to “Woman in Gold,” a film thatย could have been a stirring saga of family pain and artistic restitution but instead feels like a movie you’ve already seen more than once and didn’t care for all that much the first time.
Director Simon Curtis (“My Week with Marilyn”) and first-time screenwriter Alexi Kaye Campbell take everything unpredictable and moving about this real-life struggle and break it down into obvious and easily-digestible components, as though they were adding water to packets marked “underdogs against the system,” “sharp older lady befriends quiet young man” and “Nazi occupation of Europe.”