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Reviews Counted:24
Fresh:7
Rotten:17
Average Rating:5/10
Consensus: Klimt is handsomely filmed, but the blurred storyline and substandard performances prove its undoing.
Theatrical Release:Oct 19, 2007 Limited
Synopsis: Popular Austrian painter Gustav Klimt is portrayed by John Malkovich in this dramatic biopic by director Raoul Ruiz.
Starring: John Malkovich, Veronica Ferres, Saffron Burrows, Stephen Dillane
Director: Raoul Ruiz
Whatever its flaws may be (and, frankly, they are legion), Raoul Ruiz's latest film is a biopic that mixes and matches visual and narrative styles boldly, wildly, madly enough to invigorate the genre, but not enough to save the movie.
Top CriticImagining an artist’s life as little more than a series of portentous set pieces, [director] Ruiz, who also wrote the script, has made a film that is neither portrait nor allegory but empty ornamentalism.
An almost unbearable collection of monologues with no regard for substantive or involving dialogue, the film sheds little or no light on the genius behind some extraordinary artwork.
Klimt is a feast for the eyes and the mind.
Raoul Ruiz's absurdly overwrought phantasmagoria tries to recast the notorious Viennese artist's life as a kind of Divine Comedy: Inferno.
A handsome film, but no amount of superior art direction or glittering surface can obscure the rigor mortis that engulfs the drama.
A good bio of any historical character has to have a compelling story, whether evil or good. Klimt appears to have had that story. I sure would have liked to know what it was.
Top CriticJohn Malkovich has virtually cornered the market on portraying aesthetes in the thrall of demonic visions. Klimt adds to his gallery of elegant monsters.
Top CriticIt’s not unintriguing, but without anything resembling a dramatic progression, the going soon gets stodgy.
The whole dream-like effect the film strives for is undermined by the poor acting.
Fact, fiction and chronology are juggled and blurred with such abandon that piecing it all together is bound to be a fruitless and frustrating effort.
Klimt comes across as a lovely but unfathomable object, and an inadvertent case study in the argument for the ultimate integrity of Klimt's art.
Top CriticA beautifully designed but ponderously executed attempt to summon up the spirit of the Austrian fin-de-siècle painter.
[It's] an eyeful.
Top CriticPoor excuse for an unconventional biopic.
In the end, all the effort adds up to naught, except a hunger for the salient details the movie missed.
Saffron Burrows is a stand-out as a provocative actress (and very possibly her mischievous lookalike), but it's not enough to make the muddled plot engaging, or fit for comparison with Klimt's stunning work.
An easy-viewing intro to a racy episode in art history.
Top CriticKlimt is obviously not a dumb film, but it is one big ol' fruitcake of a movie.
Ruiz is so intent on harnessing the painter to his own -- here, rather arid -- relativism that he never manages to convey the unfettered eros that brings crowds flocking to exhibitions of Klimt’s work, even as critics hold their noses.
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