Learning to survive catastrophe

Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Jeff Bauman, a man who lost his legs during the Boston Marathon bombing.

For most of its 116-minute running time, director David Gordon Green's Stronger stakes out a claim to importance. In telling the story of Jeff Bauman (Jake Gyllenhaal), the movie becomes one of the rare entertainments that isn't about graphic displays of violence but about realistic depictions of the effects of violence on those who experience it.

For those who don't recall, Bauman was waiting at the finish line for his girlfriend (Tatiana Maslany) to complete the 2013 Boston Marathon. He lost both his legs when two bombs exploded. Bauman also was able to identify one of the bombers, having stood about a foot away from the perpetrator.

In the climate of "Boston Strong" that followed the bombings, Bauman became a hero. He was honored at a Boston Bruins hockey game and later at a Red Sox game. He was bombarded with public adulation. As a survivor of a cruel tragedy, he became a symbol of triumph over terrorist mayhem.

Green shows us what Bauman's life was like in the post-bombing days. In a wheelchair and reliant on his girlfriend and his mother (a strong Miranda Richardson), this goofy but good-hearted son of Boston faced dual problems: adjusting to a disabled life and also to the attention he never sought.

Gyllenhaal's performance anchors the movie; he mixes moments of humor with moments of self-pity. Gyllenhaal portrays a man who others see as a hero, but who would rather get drunk with pals than pat himself on the back. Who can blame him? For Bauman, using the bathroom has become a physical ordeal.

To play the role, Gyllenhaal lost weight, turning Bauman into a gaunt figure with a crooked, diffident smile. A Costco employee who worked roasting chickens before the bombing, Bauman never seemed to have any great ambitions. Had the Marathon explosion never happened, he might have been content to watch Red Sox games in bars while exchanging stinging insults with friends. He might have been a working-class Peter Pan, a young man who sees no great benefit in entering the adult world.

Bauman doesn't always appreciate the help he gets from Maslany's Erin, the girlfriend who quits her job to help him through his arduous therapy, which includes learning how to use artificial legs.

Green tries for authenticity in his depiction of working-class Bostonians, a little grittier than what we saw in Peter Berg's Patriots Day, another movie about the Boston Marathon bombings.

Bauman's family and friends are tough, profane and not altogether agreeable people who are only too happy to join him at a bar or try to capitalize (emotionally) on what they view as his ascendance. As Patty, Bauman's Mom, Richardson creates a character who's jealous of Erin's potential to replace her as the central figure in Bauman's life.

Richardson's face reflects a mixture of bitterness, fear and occasional hope; she never tries to make us like a character who has difficulty letting go of her son. Bauman lived with his mother at the time of the bombing and remained at her home afterward.

Maslany proves equally determined as Erin, a young woman who goes through hell along with Bauman and is pushed to her breaking point. Like everyone in Stronger, she's not afraid to lose her temper.

Green doesn't dwell on the explosion that took Bauman's legs, although he brings it up in quickly inserted flashbacks that, by the end, of the movie, blossom into a more vivid (and perhaps unnecessary) display of the blast that changed Bauman's life.

Scenes in which Bauman meets Carlos (Carlos Sanz), the bystander who helped him at the site of the bombing, are well played by both Sanz and Gyllenhaal. Carlos lost a son in Iraq. Evidently, many who had relatives who were killed or maimed in America's recent wars looked to Bauman's story to reassure them that life could go on.

Toward the end, Green yields to a temptation that he manages to elude for most of the movie. He allows the movie to join the inspirational chorus in which Bauman, as a person, and Bauman, as a symbol, begin to merge. These final scenes have an unavoidable taint of hagiography that mingles with a genuine thematic attempt to give Bauman moments of reconciliation that allow him once again to be comfortable in his own skin.

Obviously, there will be those who find the film's conclusion more stirring than I did, but Gyllenhaal's strong performance and equally vital contributions from a fine supporting cast keep Stronger on track, making it a powerful look at what happens when ordinary people are damaged by events over which they have no control.

I can't think of a more wrenching scene than the one in which doctors remove the bandages from Bauman's remaining legs. Not only is the removal screamingly painful, but it also serves as a stamp of finality on Bauman's condition.

Green shoots the scene creatively, showing us Bauman's tormented face and the face of his girlfriend in profile; what remains of Brad's legs appears in soft focus between them. Do we want to see? Does he?

Together, Green and Gyllenhaal have made a movie that asks us not to look away.

'Woman in Gold' fails to mine rich ore

Helen Mirren headlines a story about the quest to recover art looted by the Nazis.

The story of how a persistent woman and her inexperienced young attorney manage to reclaim five Nazi-looted paintings by artist Gustav Klimt suggests a powerful drama dealing with the continuing reverberations of the Holocaust.

Woman in Gold builds its story around one of those paintings, Klimt's 1907 painting Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. But if Klimt's gold-leafed portrait deserves masterpiece status, the movie about efforts to restore it to its rightful feels like by-the-numbers, Middlebrow fare.

Helen Mirren brings the expected amount of wit and bite to the role of Maria Altmann, one of the few surviving members of a wealthy, cultured Viennese Jewish family.

After the Anschluss, Maria and her husband escaped to the U.S. Most of the rest of Maria's family was killed by the Nazis, who also looted the Altmann art collection, including the portrait of Maria's aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer.

Years later, the Austrians have come to regard the Bloch-Bauer portrait as a national treasure. Referred to as "Austria's Mona Lisa," the painting carries a price tag of more than $100 million.

Early on, Maria -- already in her 80s and living in Los Angeles -- hires attorney Randy Schoenberg (Ryan Reynolds) to help her retrieve the art, perhaps as a way of keeping her family heritage alive.

The grandson of composer Arnold Schoenberg, Randy predictably resists -- at least initially. Just as predictably, he becomes absorbed by the case, which slowly takes over his life.

Bland to the point of blankness, Reynolds adds little to the proceedings. In another performance that hardly registers, Katie Holmes plays the attorney's wife.

Working from a screenplay by Alexi Kaye Campbell, director Simon Curtis (My Week With Marilyn) adopts an overly familiar structure, juxtaposing action in the present with war-time flashbacks in which Nazis move toward annihilating Vienna's Jewish population.

The best of these flashbacks show the lavish pre-war lives of a well-assimilated Jewish family that sees itself as a part of the city's fabric.

Max Irons portrays Maria's husband, an opera singer, and Allan Corduner appears as Maria's father, a man who can't quite believe that his secure position in Vienna could crumble so quickly.

As Aunt Adele, Antje Traue brings vibrant sophistication to the role of the woman whose portrait is at the movie's heart, and as a young Maria, Tatiana Maslany embodies the tension and fear that's being inflicted upon Jewish families.

Though well-shot, the movie's flashbacks tend to be overused and telegraphed.

An example: To pursue the case, Maria reluctantly agrees to return to Austria. After a meeting with Austrian officials, she tells Schoenberg she wants to walk back to her hotel alone. It almost seems as if she's excusing herself so that she can have another flashback.

Curtis does a reasonably good job of guiding us through the legal tangles surrounding attempts at restitution, battles that involve Austrian committees and art bureaucrats, as well as a 2004 appearance before the U.S. Supreme Court. An Austrian arbitration panel finally brought the case to its conclusion in 2006.

In Vienna, an Austrian journalist (Daniel Bruhl) helps Maria and Randy in their battle, but this character also could have used more fleshing out.

The issues involved in Altmann's story are rich enough: Maria's understandable resistance to setting foot on Austrian soil and unresolved questions about how much Holocaust awareness depends on a vanishing generation of survivors.

Rather than allowing these issues to open up for us, Curtis keeps them encased in a drama in which they don't fully resonate.

Woman in Gold isn't a bad movie, and its story is interesting enough to keep us engaged, but it needed more than dogged competence to give startling new life to the horror and injustice that are so much a part of this tale.