We watched Woman in Gold with about four other people last Sunday at the Greenfield Garden Cinema’s noon screening. It tells the story of Maria Altmann’s recovery of five Klimt paintings, including the iconic “Woman in Gold,” a portrait of her aunt, which were stolen from her family by the Nazis. Maria’s story, at least as told in cinema, is an upper class parallel to 2013’s Philomena: a young male professional helps an elderly woman right the institutional wrongs done her when she was very young. The two criss-cross the Atlantic seeking truth and justice, and the initially shallow young man discovers his soul. Helen Mirren as Maria is as captivating as Judi Dench’s Philomena.
Maria’s story begins in Vienna where the Bloch-Bauer brothers, Ferdinand and Gustav, live with their wives and Gustav’s children, Luise and Maria. The wealthy family hosts the cream of Vienna’s arts community and count Gustav Klimt and Arnold Schoenberg among their friends. Ferdinand’s wife Adele sits for Klimt, and the portrait, with its intricate gold leaf patterns, hangs in their drawing room. When the Nazis march into Vienna, persecution of the Jews follows swiftly, the Bloch-Bauer home is looted, and escape becomes nearly impossible. Adele has died a decade earlier, and Ferdinand has fled to Switzerland ahead of the Nazi invasion. Maria, now married, and her husband Fritz escape with the help of friends, but they must leave her parents behind. After the war, art works looted from Austria are returned to the Austrian government, but not to their original owners. In 1998 Austrian law regarding the stolen art changes, and Maria and her lawyer Randy Schoenberg (Arnold Schoenberg’s grandson) begin a quest to have some of the looted art returned.
Among Holocaust movies, Woman in Gold stands with Schindler’s List and The Pianist as one of the best. It has less violence than most Holocaust movies, but Maria’s confession at the end that neither the justice she’s won nor the priceless paintings she’s recovered can compensate her for having had to leave her parents behind in Nazi-occupied Austria is wrenching. Multiplied by hundreds of thousands of young émigrés, it illustrates the anguish that haunted a generation long after the Holocaust ended.