Historical accuracy
Altmann's efforts actually addressed five Klimt paintings owned by her family, including Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I and Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II, as well as three landscapes. The decisions by the US Supreme Court and the Austrian arbitrators covered all five paintings.
Film critics in Austria and Germany noted various deviations of the film from historical reality. Olga Kronsteiner from 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 at the time, who found the decisive documents and subsequently informed Maria Altmann.
Hubertus Czernin, who is depicted in the movie, is suggested to have been motivated by the fact that his father had been a member of the Nazi Party, but Stefan Grissemann from Austrian weekly Profil pointed out that his father's party membership was not known to Czernin until 2006, long after he had started to work on this and other restitution cases. In addition, Czernin's father was imprisoned by the Nazis late in the war for high treason.
Thomas Trenkler from the Viennese daily Kurier criticized the film's reference to a time limit for restitution claims in Austria, writing that there has never been such a time limit. He also wrote that his least favorite scene in the film was when Maria Altmann leaves her ailing father in Vienna in 1938. Despite the imminent danger, Maria Altmann stayed in Vienna, having said, "I would never have left my father! He died of natural causes in July 1938". Only then did she and her husband escape from Vienna.
In June 2006, based on an earlier agreement between Altmann and Ronald Lauder (which was shown in the film), Altmann sold Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I to Lauder's Neue Galerie New York for $135 million ($216 million today), setting a new mark for most expensive painting (since surpassed). Five months later, Altmann sold the companion Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II at auction (bought by Oprah Winfrey) for almost $88 million ($141 million today), then the third-highest priced painting.
Gustav Bloch-Bauer had been loaned the famous "Gore Booth Baron Rothschild" Stradivarius cello (see List of Stradivarius instruments) by the Rothschild family, which was looted by the Nazis in 1938 and retained by the German authorities until 1956.
The film strongly suggests that during the oral argument in Republic of Austria v. Altmann, Chief Justice William Rehnquist (played by Jonathan Pryce) is won over by Schoenberg and supports him. In fact, Rehnquist dissented from the court's eventual decision in Altmann's favour, and it was actually Associate Justice David Souter who asked the questions that were portrayed in the movie instead of Rehnquist.
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