Alma Maria Schindler had the kind of extraordinary life that should be perfect for a film. Born in Vienna in 1879, beautiful and educated and a budding composer, she attracted one genius after another: Gustav Klimt, Alexander Zemlinsky, Gustav Mahler, Walter Gropius, Oskar Kokoschka, and Franz Werfel were just the passionate highpoints. At her death, in 1964, she left behind letters, diaries, and a couple of memoirs. So Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy) should have had all the ammunition he needed to capture the “bride of the wind” (Kokoschka’s double portrait of himself and Alma), but instead he’s brought back the “bride of Masterpiece Theatre,” a tame hagiography that’s as conventional as most of Alma’s compositions.

Part of Beresford’s problem is that he’s tried to squeeze far too much into 95 minutes. The 10 years that Alma spent married to Mahler could fill a mini-series; Bride of the Wind runs from “1902” (they mean 1901, before Alma met Mahler) to 1919, when she and Franz Werfel and 600 of Vienna’s finest pack the Brahmssaal in the Musikverein to hear Renée Fleming sing her “Laue Sommernacht.” The other big difficulty is that, aside from attracting and inspiring these men — no small feat — Alma didn’t do much. Beresford tries to give her life shape by suggesting that her lovers all squashed her creative impulses (Mahler even insisted she stop composing) and that her true soulmate was Werfel because he encouraged her: every so often we see Alma plugging away at the piano, and the film climaxes with that 1919 public performance of her work. The truth is less uplifting: Alma appears to have written just one composition after Mahler’s death, and though she certainly had talent, the 16 songs she’s left have made it onto just a handful of recordings, as opposed to the thousands of Mahler discs. Beresford seems to sense as much, for we hear very little of her music on the soundtrack (there’s a fair bit of Mahler, but mostly it’s film-score gush from Stephen Endelman), and at the piano she’s always plinking out the melody to “Bei dir ist es traut,” as if she couldn’t progress beyond her early efforts.

Bride of the Wind unreels like the Movietone News highlight version of Alma’s life. Glimpses of Klimt and Zemlinsky precede some 50 minutes of sound and video bites from her years with Mahler: they seduce each other; she complains that he pays no attention to her; their elder daughter, Maria, dies of scarlet fever; she falls for Gropius at a spa; she decides not to leave Mahler. After his death she falls for Kokoschka; then she falls for Gropius while Kokoschka is away fighting; then she falls for Werfel while Gropius is away fighting. Beresford promises much in the title sequence, blue-tinted period shots collaged with his costumed actors. And when Maria dies, he creates a spooky Edvard Munch–like tableau: Alma shrouded alone inside, Gustav outside by the lake.

But Marilyn Levy’s TV-movie script runs the gamut from banal to lightweight. And Sarah Wynter can’t fill Alma’s shoes. She’s beautiful, and sexy in a feral way, like Sarah Miles, and as miscast as Miles was in Ryan’s Daughter — I didn’t believe for a minute that she had ever read a page of Nietzsche or written a measure of music. (Back in the ’70s Julie Christie could have done justice to a British film about Alma, but the actress this role cried out for was Hanna Schygulla.) Jonathan Pryce’s Mahler is a sensitive, mild-mannered accountant type; he’s original and thought-provoking but the concept still seems wayward next to Robert Powell’s primal portrayal in Ken Russell’s 1974 Mahler. August Schmölzer’s Klimt is bearish and paternal; Vincent Perez’s Kokoschka is rumpled and intense; Simon Verhoeven’s Gropius is Greek-god handsome and dedicated to functional architecture; Gregor Seberg’s Werfel is stocky and funny and a Socialist. That’s as deep as it gets.

The real Alma Schindler wasn’t a great composer, but she was the bride of inspiration, an intelligent, ineffable, one-of-a-kind woman who deserves a better movie. Beresford has made an attempt at period detail (there are nonetheless odd lapses, like Alma asking Gustav to conduct her piano-accompanied songs), and this film is more “accurate” than Ken Russell’s fantasy, but Georgina Hale’s comic-strip Alma runs rings around Wynter, and in the end Russell proves there’s a big difference between being accurate and being true.

Jeffrey’s “Off the Record” review of the Bride of the Wind soundtrack is on page 23.

Issue Date: June 21-28, 2001