Alma's Parade of Geniuses By Philip Kennicott Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, June 15, 2001

Sarah Wynter and Jonathan Pryce in "Bride of the Wind." (Paramount Classics)

"Bride of the Wind," a new biopic with a nice gauzy sheen, prettifies her story and softens the edges of her personality. It has moments of humor, some of them intentional, and it occasionally tugs at the heartstrings. Yet it ultimately makes real history feel ridiculously improbable. Of course Vienna was full of talented, beautiful and powerful people, and sometimes they got naked with each other. But did they really bump into each other so often and so seemingly accidentally?

The real-life Alma did indeed lead one of the great truth-is-stranger-than-fiction lives of our century. She had an uncanny connection between her libido and her intelligence, and she possessed ample quantities of both. She talked herself into and out of love. When in love, she loved ferociously; when bored, she moved on. She knew herself well enough to know when she was on the make, and she understood the importance of posterity enough to say unflattering things about the men she hurt.

"Bride of the Wind," directed by Bruce Beresford, follows the broad outlines of her story with an unusual degree of historical fidelity. Alma (Sarah Wynter) is stunningly handsome and a swift talker. She meets her first husband, Mahler, over dinner, and they quickly cross swords on the subject of music. She sacrifices her own composing at Mahler's request (though the real Mahler ultimately found merit in her music and encouraged her), and she spends much of her young adulthood as Mahler's caretaker, amanuensis, accountant and nurse. In turn, she enjoys the attentions of the most powerful musician in Vienna, a legendary conductor and composer whose genius will eventually make his music a staple of the concert hall.

On occasion she balks at her subordination, and her memoirs reveal profound resentment of a husband 20 years her senior. Mahler, played with gentle self-absorption by Jonathan Pryce, adored her; he also adored music, and no doubt he got the balance wrong on occasion.

There were indeed plenty of affairs. Early in the film, we see Zemlinsky, a lesser composer than Mahler but not a shabby one, plant a big, icky wet one on the young Alma. Yet the movie says nothing about what a cow she was to the poor man; the real Alma sent the sadly self-conscious Zemlinsky passionate love letters while calling him a troll; the real Alma let every man know exactly how good a deal he was getting.

Alma eventually dropped Zemlinsky for Mahler, leaving the former stunned, confused and deeply hurt, which is pretty much the same effect that her extramarital infatuation for the young Gropius had on the latter.

The film proposes the usual thesis of the artist-as-celebrity genre: Men make art to get girls. Kokoschka paints his masterpiece, "The Tempest (Bride of the Wind)," just to cinch a marriage deal with Alma; she refuses, but we do get to see them make passionate love.

The film also frames Alma's early life entirely in terms of woman's frustrated artistic ambition. With Mahler dead, Kokoschka edging into madness and Gropius gone in high dudgeon, Alma takes up with the young writer Werfel, who rediscovers her music. She returns to composing, and in the final scene we see the soprano Renee Fleming, in a cameo appearance, singing a recital of Alma's songs for an adoring audience. Alma's long quest for meaning and purpose has been fulfilled.

Let's see: Men make art to get sex; women have sex when they can't make art.

That's all too glib, and so are the occasional history lessons that are dropped like didactic broccoli into a meal that would be better without any attempt at intellectual roughage. When Mahler discourses on the symphony as an act of world creation, and Gropius lectures his wife on the need to do away with ornament in architecture, you want to slap them. Great men probably don't need to give the 10-second summary of their life's work to the women they love – especially canny and well-educated ones like Alma.

"Bride of the Wind" can't decide just how profound it wants to be. It takes its history too seriously to be a popular romp like "Shakespeare in Love," and its art too seriously to be a culture farce like the Bernadette Peters and Hugh Grant romp "Impromptu." Yet for all its sobriety, it adds very little new to the record, and it takes few speculative chances. Culture freaks will enjoy some of the inside jokes, and playing intellectual Where's Waldo: Give yourself extra credit for picking out Arnold Schoenberg, whose bald head graces several scenes without speaking a word.

The music is mostly by Mahler, though for some reason a composer was hired to produce some uninspired Mahler-pastiche for scene-setting. The director should have hired a conducting tutor for Pryce, who is sympathetic in the role of Mahler but thoroughly unbelievable when he's standing in front of an orchestra. And for some reason, everyone in Vienna speaks English with an unplaceable foreign accent, one of the odd gaffes in a film that might have opted for levity but instead veers dangerously close to pretentiousness more than a few times.

"Bride of the Wind" (99 minutes, at the Cineplex Odeon Outer Circle and Shirlington 7) is rated R for nudity and sex scenes.