Review of Woman in Gold (2015) by Paul M — 04 Apr 2015

As someone who has been to Judenplatz, the location of the Holocaust Memorial in Vienna where Schoenberg has his vomiting catharsis, and Belzec, the death camp in Poland mentioned in the film [875,000 Jews killed in 9 months], the film sent shivers up my spine. The scene where a man on the courthouse steps scoffs at Altmann as one of those Jews who only think of the Holocast brought back memories of my elevator ride in a hotel in Lublin, Poland (site of Majdanek death camp) when a man said to me, "It never happened.".

Dull, say the sanctimonious critics? Funny, but the following scenes didn't seem dull to me: Nazis goose-stepping through the Vienna streets cheered by their future victims, the spot-on depiction of the palpable horror of Jews realizing they should have left, Altmann's hair-raising escape from Vienna with her new husband, the harrowing guilt in the journal editor [who exposed Kurt Waldheim as a Nazi] when he realizes his father was a Nazi, the stirring speech by the underdog to the Supreme Court reminiscent of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. I could go on. There's a reason the audience's rating is double that of the critics. Obviously, we didn't see the same movie.