Women in Gold is based on the true story of a woman's journey to reclaim her heritage and seek some small element of justice for what happened to her family during the second World War. Not to diminish it, but the film is essentially another story the Nazi plunder of art owned by Jews and other enemy's of the state during WWII.
In the film, which begins sixty years after she escaped from Nazi controlled Vienna to the United Sates, an elderly Jewish woman starts on a journey to retrieve her family possessions seized by the Nazis . . . among them Klimt's famous painting 'Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I'. Together with her inexperienced young lawyer, she embarks upon a major battle which takes them to the heart of the Austrian establishment and the U.S. Supreme Court.
My only problem with the movie was with the main character, depicted by the actress Helen Mirren was presented as an uptight, unfeeling, unemotional women . . . which may have been her real personality . . . except in flashbacks to her younger years, she appeared warm and loving.
In June 2006 the painting,'Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I' was sold for 135 million dollars to Ronald Lauder for his Neue Galerie in New York City, at the time a record price for a painting. It has been on display at the Neue Galerie since July 2006.
From Wikipedia: Some in the art world criticized the heirs' decision to sell all of the recovered paintings: specifically, New York Times chief art critic described the heirs as "cashing in", and thus transforming a "story about justice and redemption after the Holocaust" into "yet another tale of the crazy, intoxicating art market". The critic Kimmelman wrote: "Wouldn't it have been remarkable (I'm just dreaming here) if the heirs had decided instead to donate one or more of the paintings to a public institution?[
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