(USA/Germany, 118 min.)
Dir. George Clooney, Writ. George Clooney, Grant Heslov
Starring: George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John
Goodman, Bob Balaban, Jean Dujardin, Hugh Bonneville, and Cate Blanchett.
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| Stokes (George Clooney) presents his case to President Roosevelt in Columbia Pictures' The Monuments Men. Photo by: Claudette Barius |
There is, sadly, nothing monumental about George Clooney’s
latest picture. The Monuments Men,
Clooney’s fifth film as a director, is about as far off the mark of its
potential as it can get. There’s enough grandeur in the material and enough
talent in the cast and crew that The
Monuments Men has the makings to be one of the best films of his career as
a director. Instead, it’s his worst film.
The Monuments Men is a loose adaptation of the non-fiction book by Robert M. Edsel (with Bret Witter) about an untold chapter of the Second World War. It’s a story about a group of soldiers—American, British, and French—that was tasked with going to the fields of battle to preserve elements of culture—paintings, sculptures, sacred places—so that some element of culture would survive amidst the bombed out ruins. It might seem a trivia affair to dodge a bullet to save a painting when soldiers and innocent civilians are dying everywhere, but the effort of the Monuments Men is essentially archival work gone commando. Preserve what we have today so that there’s something left for tomorrow and ensure that traces of a culture survive to defy the eradication of its people.
Edsel’s book is a highly readable and well-researched
account of the efforts of the men who formed the Monuments Men and of the
ordinary citizens who were unsung heroes of cultural preservation. It is,
however, a thick overview of art history, so the book provides ample room for
creative liberties in order to make the mission more dramatic and cinematic.
Liberties Clooney and co-writer Grant Heslov do take, but they aren’t for the
better. This version of The Monuments Men
is a muddled mess that neither does justice its subject nor offers something
satisfying for its audience.
The Monuments Men,
the movie, simplifies the efforts of the individuals within the unit and of the
larger institutional scope that made this a rather great effort. The decision
to make the unit presents itself as a slapdash affair whereas Edsel’s account
of it—supported by documents and evidence—suggests that the effort to preserve
cultural artefacts was actually a moderately well-coordinated idea between
cultural bodies and academics following the attack on Pearl Harbour. There wasn’t
much of a direct mission per se, but The
Monuments Men essentially shows a group of bumbling men who are the
antithesis of GI Joe playing treasure hunt. The film has no plot or purpose: it’s
just a few meandering threads that loosely touch upon the group’s efforts to
thwart Hitler’s cultural conquest.
The shapelessness of the film is a key disservice. It’s
surprisingly boring, for one, to watch a talented cast of Clooney, Matt Damon, Cate
Blanchett, John Goodman, Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, Jan Dujardin, and Lord
Grantham joke around and talk about art. The lack of complication in the film,
however, makes it seem like the efforts of The Monuments Men were easy. The
film more or less presents their participation as a quest of “X marks the spot”.
They need a painting, they find a painting, and they walk in and get it. Some
conflict, some Hollywoodized story arc might have made for a better film. It’s
odd to advocate for the Argo-ization
of history, but Argo (which Clooney
and Heslov produced) offers solid entertainment and invites people to seek out
the complete story because the most embellished theatrics of the affair leave
little doubt that it is a piece of entertainment first and foremost, and a
piece of historical record only tangentially at best.
By going for broad comedy, though, The Monuments Men ultimately does history a wrong. The easy laughs
and broad strokes with which Clooney paints this art history pic suggest that
the effort of the Monuments Men was not a serious one. The silly laughs, which
often fall flat, trivialize the story by making it more about the buffoonish camaraderie
between Bill Murray and Bob Balaban than about preserving the culture. One of
the few scenes that actually work, though, sees Murray and Balaban venture stumble
into Nazi territory Inglourious Basterds style
and ferret out an art thief in the most humorous of circumstances. This one
scene smartly puts the art hunt as the crux of the joke, rather than as a smoky
setting for a few easy yuk yuks.
Similarly, The
Monuments Men doesn’t quite do justice to the efforts of Rose Valland, the
woman on whom Cate Blanchett’s Claire Simone is based, who spied on the Nazis
for years and reportedly rose from bring a thankless museum volunteer to key figure
for protecting and finding stolen art. The film admittedly shows some efforts
by opening on Claire spitting into a Nazi champagne glass, yet it also reduces
the gravity of the work by making Claire more of an ambiguous love interest for
Damon’s James Granger. The film acknowledges her participation, but downplays it. (Alternatively, by changing all the names of the figures in Edsel's book, The Monuments Men doesn't directly dramatized the stories that inspired it.) This underdeveloped thread glosses over the work
undertaken in tagging and tracking the art stolen by the Nazis, and it just
doesn’t play out with credibility as Claire hands over years’ of work to
further the cause. Blanchett, however, might be the one member of the cast to create a significant emotional investment in her character's attachment to the art, which gives the viewer some sense of the weight that Claire and other civilians in the art world were carrying. Some of the best scenes of the film appear in this
storyline, like when Granger and Claire find themselves returning a painting to
a looted and graffitied home, standing in an empty but strikingly lit flat, but
The Monuments Men never really gets a
handle on connecting the significance of the story with the cinematic element
of it. It’s a tonally uneven film for a filmmaker who has packed a range of
material and style more successfully in other projects.
The story seems silly from beginning to end, even (or
especially) when Clooney’s Frank stokes lectures on the significance of the
Monuments Men in hackneyed voiceover. The
Monuments Men frames the story within a lecture Stokes delivers to FDR that
outlines the valour of the men with some grossly on-the-nose observations and
insights. Clooney delivers the words with the same leap for pathos that made
such voiceover extremely affective in The
Descendants (one can’t mistake the influence of Alexander Payne within this
aspect of the script), but The Monuments
Men is all an act of telling, rather than of showing. It feels extremely
base and middlebrow for a film that pays homage to higher culture.
A grandiose score by Alexandre Desplat feels as if it
belongs in another movie, while none of the performers ever really seems to
have a handle on the wayward tone of Clooney’s direction. The Monuments Men has a beat and energy that ring of cartoonishness
along with a whiff of historical revisionism that never works. It’s as if
everyone seems to sense that this is a story worth telling, but nobody knows
how to tell it. The Monuments Men is
a portrait of Michelangelo done as finger painting.
Rating: ★★ (out of ★★★★★)
The Monuments Men opens in wide release February 7.
