Woman in Gold (2015) on Netflix
PG-1320151h 49mBiographyDramaHistory
Jewish refugee Maria Altmann finds letters about paintings the Nazis took from her family in Vienna. With lawyer Randy Schoenberg she claims her aunt Adele Bloch-Bauer's portrait from Austria.
- Netflix4.3/5
- IMDb7.3/1066,469 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes57%
Trailer
Plot summary
In 1998 Los Angeles, Maria Altmann, a widowed Jewish refugee, attends her sister's funeral and finds letters her sister kept about the artwork the Bloch-Bauer family left behind in Vienna when they fled the Nazis. Among the pieces is a portrait of Maria's aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer, which Austria calls the Woman in Gold and which hangs in the Belvedere Museum. Maria asks E. Randol Schoenberg, the inexperienced son of a family friend, to file a claim with Austria's art restitution board. He takes the case for its possible value and first has to persuade his employers to let him work on it. In Vienna, Maria returns to the city she left, and the minister and the museum's art director refuse to give up the painting.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Woman in Gold (2015)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Olga Kronsteiner of the Austrian daily Der Standard wrote that it was not Maria Altmann's lawyer, Randol Schönberg, who researched and initiated the restitution case, but Austrian journalist Hubertus Czernin, who had worked on a number of restitution files and found the decisive documents before informing Altmann.
- The film suggests Hubertus Czernin was motivated by his father's Nazi Party membership, but Stefan Grissemann of the Austrian weekly Profil pointed out that Czernin did not know of it until 2006, long after he had started work on the restitution cases, and that his father was imprisoned by the Nazis late in the war for high treason.
SPOILER
In June 2006 Altmann sold Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I to Ronald Lauder's Neue Galerie New York for $135 million, setting a new mark for most expensive painting. Five months later she sold the companion Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II at auction, bought by Oprah Winfrey, for almost $88 million.- Gustav Bloch-Bauer had been loaned the famous “Gore Booth Baron Rothschild” Stradivarius cello by the Rothschild family, and it was looted by the Nazis in 1938 and retained by the German authorities until 1956.
SPOILER
The film strongly suggests that during the oral argument in Republic of Austria v. Altmann the Chief Justice, William Rehnquist, is won over by Schoenberg. In fact Rehnquist dissented from the court's eventual decision in Altmann's favour, and it was Associate Justice David Souter who asked the questions portrayed in the movie.
