to love art is to love life

Rating: 8/10 (13 July 2015)

During their occupation of Europe, the Nazis looted countless paintings. The paintings' rightful owners later spent years trying to reclaim them. A famous case was that of Maria Altmann, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna. Gustav Klimt painted a portrait of her aunt Adele, and the Nazis seized the painting after taking over Austria. Altmann's quest to reclaim the painting turned into a tug-of-war between the US and Austria in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Simon Curtis's "Woman in Gold" tells this story, starring Helen Mirren as Altmann and Ryan Reynolds as her lawyer. Part of what we see is how the lawyer - whose superiors at the law firm are REAL jerks - starts out isolated from his family history, but the trial reconnects him. I didn't even know about this story until the movie got released.
Does the movie have any downside? Well, it's likely that Altmann's family made their wealth by paying slave wages, and the movie never addresses this. Of course, Hitler used the Jews' economic success to depict the Jews as money-grubbers, so this might not be the best place to address it.
Overall, I recommend the movie. This is a part of history that no one should ever forget.