Interesting But Could Have Been Better

Rating: 6/10 (6 April 2015)

A good, solid job, no more, no less, but it could have used more focus on the flashbacks to Altman's life in Vienna before she escaped in 1939.
Billy Wilder, who grew up in Vienna, once said that the Austrians were the cleverest people in the world – they had convinced everyone that Beethoven was an Austrian and Hitler was a German. After the Third Reich lost, the Austrians managed to portray the Anschluss as Hitler's first conquest and themselves as his first victim. In actuality, Hitler was welcomed with immense enthusiasm and large numbers of Austrians were devoted Nazis. That's not surprising because Hitler's view of the world was essentially Austro-German, both the belief that the Germans were the natural rulers over an empire of Slavs and the ferocious middle class anti-Semitism.
Late Hapsburg and post-1918 Vienna had a large, prosperous Jewish upper middle class, prominent in finance, industry and intellectual pursuits, thoroughly assimilated to Austro-German high culture, who had been protected, if not exactly embraced, by Kaiser Franz Josef and the Hapsburg aristocracy. They were also envied and hated by the gentile craftsmen and shopkeepers of Vienna, who repeatedly elected anti- Semite Karl Lueger as mayor despite the opposition of the Kaiser and the government. Lueger was a populist reformer, a proponent of social welfare legislation, and a great builder of infrastructure, not unlike LaGuardia. A devout Catholic himself, Lueger realized that any populist mass movement in Vienna would have to be anti-Semitic to succeed, and he regularly denounced the Jews. Hitler saw him as a model, both as an anti-Semite and as a charismatic politician. Until very recently, he was memorialized in Vienna street names, and there are still statues of him there.
The movie's best scenes are street scenes in Vienna in the aftermath of the Anschluss, where Jews are forced scrub anti-Nazi graffiti off the sidewalks, to paint "Jude" on their businesses, and to have their beards and sidelocks shorn. The crowds of gentile onlookers are not merely curious; they're as excited and happy to see justice being done as crackers at a lynching. In Altman's dealings with modern Austrian bureaucrats, the movie subtly conveys the sense that, though not Nazis themselves, they are content to see the Jews gone and have no more intention of giving back the loot than Americans have of giving Texas back to the Comanches. What Altman wants from the Austrians is a confession that they are the knowing receivers of stolen goods and that their ancestors participated enthusiastically in the theft. She never gets it, which is why the Klimt now hangs in the Neue Galerie in New York.