Someday you’ll probably need to decorate the barren walls in your new home so you’ll go buy a nice painting from a department store. Maybe a pleasant park with a little dog in the corner, something like that.

It’ll be good enough to look at regularly, but it won’t start any conversations. It just takes up space on your wall and isn’t an eyesore, which is perfectly fine.

That’s basically the function “Woman in Gold” serves. Everyone showed up and did their jobs adequately enough to produce a movie that paints by the numbers without ever doing anything remarkably well.

I’m sorry about the bad art metaphors. I just had to get those out of my system.

Anyway, “Woman in Gold” tells the true story of Maria Altmann (Helen Mirren), a Jewish woman who escaped Austria shortly after the Nazis took over and moved to the United States. 

In the late 1990s, Altmann hired a young lawyer, Randol Schoenberg (Ryan Reynolds), to help her get ownership of a priceless painting of her aunt that the Nazis stole and the Austrian government kept after the war. 

As you’d expect, Altmann actually was the legal owner of the painting, but the Austrians were not willing to go without a fight, so it goes to court. 

That’s obviously an incredible story, one that’s worth telling in a Hollywood film. However, “Woman in Gold” never goes the extra mile to make it truly special. 

It checks off all the boxes on the “crowd-pleasing drama” list, leaving a film that will predictably try to pull at your heartstrings, which it does fairly successfully. It’s just that it leaves little room for surprise or amazement.

Mirren is her usual radiant self, stealing the show as Altmann, who will absolutely not take no for an answer. Reynolds, meanwhile, plays the same basic character he usually plays, which works decently enough until he’s forced to show his inconsistent and sort of awkward dramatic side.

The only real problem with “Woman in Gold” is the way it cuts to lengthy flashback sequences depicting Altmann’s life in Austria. These scenes tell a genuinely heartbreaking story of escaping Nazi rule, but they’re often incredibly long and spliced into the main story at seemingly random moments.

It almost feels like they made two movies, but neither of them were long enough to fill out 90 minutes, so they just gave us two for the price of one. What’s on display is fine, but the two storylines don’t always mesh with each other.

You’ll walk out of “Woman in Gold” feeling good, which is what it tries to do. It’s a nice, safe and slightly dull depiction of a terrific story. It’s fine, but it’ll never be in a museum.