★★ ½

Helen Mirren's fierce empathy, which can suggest both flinty assertion and embers of vulnerability, dominates the real-life legal melodrama Woman in Gold. But as fine as the performance of the English actress is, she can't save what should be a compelling story from by-the-numbers storytelling. The movie barely leaves a mark in revealing what were bitterly deep wounds.

Mirren plays Maria Altmann​,  a long-time resident of Los Angeles whose accent and authoritative bearing make clear her upbringing in Austria in the years before  World War II. Upon burying her sister in 1998, she comes upon letters about notable artworks – especially Gustav Klimt​'s 1907 masterpiece Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, whose subject is Maria's late aunt – that were stolen by the Nazis upon their annexation of Austria in 1938 and never returned to the scattered survivors of the Jewish family.

Maria's instrument of investigation is the lawyer son of a friend, Randy Schoenberg (Ryan Reynolds), whose own exiled Austrian heritage includes his composer grandfather Arnold. With the help of a Viennese investigative journalist, Hubertus Czernin (Daniel Bruhl), a legitimate case is established for reclaiming several paintings, but the Austrian government will not consider releasing the iconic Klimt.

The painting is a national treasure commonly referred to as Woman in Gold, and the idea that the state has rewritten history to eradicate Adele's personal life is one of several themes adequately nodded to in a film directed with workmanlike predictability by British filmmaker Simon Curtis (My Week With Marilyn).

A contemplative moment near a reflective surface inevitability brings a flashback to Maria's past, with Tatiana Maslany (of television's Orphan Black) playing her as a young wife trying to flee the onset of what would be the Holocaust. Maria's escape from Vienna plays as a thriller but, like the modern-day courtroom machinations, the sequences don't add up to anything stronger when placed together.

The dynamic between Maria and Randy is sometimes cliched – a tactless performance by Reynolds doesn't help – and Maria's tart humour is often used to soften sharp corners that stem from genuine anguish. When Maria wearies, Randy pushes on, and vice versa. Some clever additions, including Jonathan Pryce as a wry Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, square the ledger.

Woman in Gold eventually acknowledges that recovering a priceless work of art doesn't bring back lost family, but only a few scenes – such as a wedding dance overwhelmed by the sound of jackboots – manage to be memorably powerful. The version of Klimt's Woman in Gold repeatedly shown is a reproduction, a copy of something remarkable, and so is the movie itself.