Simon Curtis's 'Woman in Gold'

The Nazis stole an enormous quantity of art, of course, both from private parties and public museums. Many pieces were destroyed and many disappeared, and restitution cases are still pending for some 100,000 others. Only one, however, not only hung openly in a state gallery, but was grandly claimed as the great artistic symbol of the national patrimony. That was Adele’s portrait, the large painting of a 25-year-old member of Vienna’s wealthy prewar Jewish elite.

Klimt painted Adele as a pensive, sensuous young woman, and gowned her in an outsized, intricately patterned period dress figured in gold leaf. Actually, the painting in question — Adele I — was only the first of five that Klimt painted of his subject, but it was also the most ambitious, and by far the best known. It sat in the family salon for 30 years until its confiscation; Adele herself had died of meningitis in 1925.

Reframing the past

Adele’s niece Maria Altmann managed to escape Austria after the Anschluss of 1938. She settled in Los Angeles, ran a shop, and tried like so many other Holocaust refugees to turn the page. After 60 years, when she was in her 80s, she decided to square accounts. The restitution movement had only begun to gather real steam, and Adele Bloch-Bauer I, whose identity (and provenance) had been glossed over in a generic retitling as Woman in Gold, was now the touristic centerpiece of a denazified Austria. Adele I had been the private possession of a Jewish household exterminated by the Nazis with the enthusiastic support of most Austrians; Woman in Gold was the deracinated symbol of Austria’s prewar splendor, the prized possession of the Fatherland.

Simon Curtis’s film Woman in Gold begins with Maria (Helen Mirren) trying to engage a young attorney, Randol Schoenberg (Ryan Reynolds), in her quixotic battle to recover Adele and several other Klimts that were also taken from the family through Austria’s newly formed Restitution Commission. Randy is — by coincidence or design? it’s not clear — the great-grandson of Arnold Schoenberg, although Randy seems not to have much appreciation of his descent from one of the most significant cultural figures of the 20th century.

Randy is slowly drawn into the case by Adele and her story, however, even at the cost of resigning from his new position at a tony law firm. Together with Adele, he flies to Vienna to pursue the case, where he is assisted by a young Austrian journalist, Hubertus Czernin (Daniel Brühl), who just happens to have been the man who had a few years earlier exposed the wartime service of Austria’s best-known political figure, Kurt Waldheim, in Hitler’s Wehrmacht.

Staking a claim

Such a plot would seem to have passed the bounds of even cinematic plausibility, except that the events it describes were in fact true. Rebuffed by the Restitution Commission, whose actual function seems to be to give a legal veneer to the appropriation of masterpieces, Randy has an epiphany when he realizes that Adele’s likeness is being exploited commercially in the United States, which exposes it to American jurisdiction. Now it’s his turn to push Maria, whose trip to Vienna has revived the trauma of her family’s destruction and her own desperate escape from Austria (told in dramatic flashbacks and with shootout scenes reminiscent of Ben Affleck’s Argo).

The story meanwhile gains attention in the Los Angeles Jewish community. Maria is courted in one scene by a suave Ronald Lauder (Ben Miles), who tells her that Randy is out of his league pleading a case that will, if successful, lead to the U.S. Supreme Court. But she remains loyal to her knight errant, who finds a sympathetic auditor in Chief Justice William Rehnquist (Jonathan Pryce) — perhaps the film’s unlikeliest hero of all. But even the Supreme Court can’t order the painting repatriated by a sovereign government, and Randy must roll the dice once more with an arbitration commission until he is finally victorious.

What was Austria’s role?

The script unfortunately goes through the formulaic rituals of a Hollywood thriller to tell its worthy story. There is also the question of how to represent Austria itself. Germany is nowadays profuse in its apologies for the Holocaust, even though this has not prevented it from dominating Europe once again. Austria, however, has always represented itself as a victim of the Nazis, even though it had provided the seedbed of anti-Semitism that nurtured its native son, Adolf Hitler; welcomed him home as a conquering hero; and, once annexed to the Reich, proved a full and willing collaborator in his crimes. The film does suggest Czernin as a redeeming character and takes pains to show Vienna’s new Holocaust monument as well as a concert featuring Schoenberg. But the anti-Semitism that is again rampant in Europe never left Austria or even bothered to conceal itself except for cosmetic purposes.

Helen Mirren gives a superbly nuanced performance as Maria, and a better-developed (or -portrayed) Randy might have provided more of a dramatic foil. As for Adele — Ronald Lauder bought her from Maria for $135 million, and she hangs today on permanent display in New York’s Neue Galerie. Score one for justice, at least for now.