WOMAN IN GOLD  3.2***       

 

          This film presents a WWII true story about a Jewish survivor of World War II, named Maria Altmann ( played by Helen Mirren), a former Viennese who wants a famous family painting by Gustav Klimt returned to her possession since it was stolen by the Nazis. She enlists the help of a family friend, lawyer Randy Schoenberg ( Ryan Reynolds), who also has WW II connections. But he is young and inexperienced in the law of repatriation of art. The painting (see below) of her aunt is famous for its size, the gold leafing, and its early twentieth century modernism.  It has come to be referred to as the "Mona Lisa" of Austria because of its popularity, and its government steadfastly refuses to consider her claim

 

 Maria Altmann's connection to this stellar painting  is that it reminds her not only of her aunt, but the family, friends, and life style that she lost forever when she fled with Vienna her husband with little more than the clothes on their back. The fight she and  Schoenberg  wage is against a system and a government that appear insurmountable. “Woman in Gold” is told in two stories, one about the pursuit of justice for the return of the painting, and the other through flashbacks before and after the Nazis occupied Vienna, showing Maria's life in Vienna and the loss of much of her family to the Holocaust . Edited together, you get enough background into the Holocaust and the war to understand Maria Altmann's motivation to seek long-overdue justice not just for herself, but all the other Jews and others who lost everything during WWII with little or usually no hope of restitution.  

 

The movie is well acted  and the cinematography is gorgeous, especially the scenes in Vienna   The movie is somewhat slow at the beginning  but once it gets up to speed, it becomes quite captivating. By the end of the film, I was quite satisfied and both my wife and I give it “thumbs up”.

 

Clark