Slow-moving but thought-provoking drama

Rating: 7/10 (18 November 2019)

An Austrian refugee (Maria Altmann, played by Helen Mirren) engages a lawyer to help her recover artwork (including Gustav Klimt's iconic "Woman in Gold" (Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I), allegedly stolen (directly) from her family by the Nazis, and later stolen (indirectly) by the famous Belvedere Museum in Vienna, The story is fascinating and, other than some gimmicky 'doorway into the past' scenes, the film is very well done. Mirren was quite good as the techy, elderly women who discovers that she might have a chance to undo an historic wrong. I was less impressed at Ryan Reynold's underdogish E. Randol Schoenberg. I don't recall any scene in the film in which the heroic lawyer's potential fee is discussed (but at 40% contingency, he made over $120 million dollars) and I'm not sure what would have happened if Altmann had decided not to sell the paintings. While, at least as I know the story, law and justice were on Altmann's side, I was still somewhat put off by the one-sidedness of the story: anyone who disagreed with Altmann or Schoenberg is presented as either a smarmy museum suit, a supercilious bureaucrat, or an anti-Semite. Over-all, a slow-moving but thought-provoking film about complicated legal and moral issues.