Review // The Monuments Men

The Monuments Men preaches to the choir, and does little else.

If you’re watching The Monuments Men and hoping that – amidst the speeches about the importance of art and the pride of working to protect it – an adventure film is going to break out…I’ve got some bad news. With his newest feature film George Clooney (along with regular screenwriting partner Grant Heslov) harken back to war flicks of old. Unfortunately, while they obviously paid attention to the look and style, they forgot what made those films great, a little excitement and some truly high stakes.

The Monuments Men starts promisingly enough. After a quick set up to ensure George Clooney will be able to narrate whenever needed (he’s pitching the Monuments project to FDR), the film leaps into the requisite “assembling the team” montage as museum curators, architects, designers and theatre producers are dragged into the war effort. There are some good laughs as the aged cast (which includes Bill Murray, John Goodman, Bob Balaban, Jean Dujardin and Hugh Bonneville) stumble through basic training, but we still know precious little about the characters as, before long,  they’re stepping off an amphibious craft and on to the very recently-invaded beaches of Normandy.

While the soldiers are split in to pairs, hunting down leads in France and Belgium, Matt Damon’s James Granger – a Metropolitan Museum of art curator – is given the task of sneaking in to France to meet up with Claire Simone (Cate Blanchett), the curator at Paris’s Jeu de Paume museum. Simone is now secretary to the SS officer in charge of making sure the museum’s masterpieces are shipped off to Germany to be hung in Hitler’s planned Fuhrermuseum. A very detailed ledger in Simone’s possession holds the key to Granger and the men returning the stolen art to its rightful owners, but she isn’t trusting anyone with the priceless information. While trying to pry a notebook from a dowdy curator’s hands sounds a little dull, it’s surprisingly exciting compared to what war looks like in the film.

Following in the wake of the retreating Nazi’s, the paired-off soldiers (Bob Balaban and BIll Murray being the only two who use this time to create any sort of interesting relationship) push nearer and nearer to the front lines. But despite the wreckage all around them, and the occasional Allied soldiers, there is very little immediacy in their actions. In fact, The Monuments Men squanders moment after moment that could have been played for excitement. Sure a few people get shot, a few more get shot at, but each incident is presented in a way almost devoid of tension. Near the end of the film the Monuments Men are rushing to grab some art before the Russians close in from the Eastern front. Your blood gets pumping, you say to yourself “oh no, here come the Russians, here comes trouble!” and suddenly we cut to a car as the Monuments Men drive away. “That was close,” says one, as George Clooney begins a new speech on the importance and meaning of art.

And we get it, art is important. What the men and women of the MFAA did in World War II was an amazing service to Western civilization, and Robert M. Edsel’s book (upon which the film is loosely based) is likely a fascinating read. But when you market your film as “the greatest art heist in history”, I’m expecting a bit more excitement than a group of old guys waxing poetic over a liberated Vermeer. Clooney seems very worried that people who have just paid money to see a piece of art don’t truly understand it’s importance like he does. And though he raises the question “is any piece of art worth a human life?” multiple times in the film, he does little in the way of answering it.

While I don’t know enough about the true events to judge the historical accuracy of the film, one has to imagine that the real-life circumstances were far more exciting than those presented. It’s never a good plan to play fast and loose with history, but Clooney would be forgiven a little fact-twisting in service of spicing up his story. That’s how good stories are made after all. Everyone does it, and for some, it’s basically an art.

Reviewed by Evan Arppe.

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