The Monuments Men *** (2014, George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Cate Blanchett, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban, Hugh Bonneville) – Movie Review

George Clooney directs himself as Frank Stokes, who gets together an unlikely, unfit, over-the-hill World War Two military platoon of art blokes to rescue art masterpieces from Nazi thieves and return them to their owners. They’re particularly after the stunning Madonna of Bruges by Michelangelo.

Daniel Craig was cast as his co-star, playing New York Metropolitan Museum of Art curator James Granger, but he had to drop out due to scheduling conflicts and Clooney’s old pal Matt Damon replaced him, in their sixth collaboration. The old friends work well together of course.

Bill Murray, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban, Hugh Bonneville are the others of Clooney’s Magnificent Seven. It’s a very choice, expert cast, promising much. Murray and Balaban provide some bickering, bumbling comedy among all the serious war stuff. Remember there’s still a war on, everything is in chaos and up for grabs, much is destroyed or lost and people are getting killed.

Clooney tells his men not to get killed for no piece of art is worth a human life. That’s going to prove very poignant, as his guys put themselves in mortal danger several times in the course of their work, and it’s going to be impossible to avoid tragedy in all the greed and chaos in Europe as the war finally starts to wrap up. But by the end Clooney’s character is going to be asked whether what they did was worth lives, and he seems to agree that it was. The film has a strong need to discuss this issue of course.

Clooney’s wartime action drama has an almost entirely male cast, but it also stars Cate Blanchett as a brave French Resistance leader Damon seeks out because she has the knowledge of the art’s whereabouts. She’s been wrongly jailed as a collaborator because she worked in a Paris art gallery with the Germans on cataloguing art masterpieces, but Damon knows her boss was shipping the stuff back to the Fatherland, where Hitler was planning the ultimate Hitler Tribute Art Museum full of everything his underlings could steal from churches, museums and Jewish homes.

And so it’s Damon who has the Brief Encounter-style romance to handle, on a last night in Paris, when his married father character is entertained at home by a newly melted and smiling Blanchett, This is a rare intimate scene in a generally robust movie.

Clooney’s screenplay with his writing partner Grant Heslov, is a fictionalised version of the true story of the greatest treasure hunt in history, using dramatic licence to change characters and incidents considerably, but keeping to the spirit of things. With the art trapped behind enemy lines, and with the German army under orders to destroy everything as the Reich fell, how can seven museum directors, curators and art historians hope to succeed? Thus The Monuments Men find themselves risking their lives in a race against time to stop the destruction of 1000 years of culture.

The yarn has echoes of the great wartime adventures, like The Great Escape, The Guns of Navarone, The Dirty Dozen and The Bridge on the River Kwai, but only distant echoes. ‘There’s a certain romance around these movies,’ says Clooney. ‘In those movies you fell in love with the characters and actors as much as the story. And we thought The Monuments Men was a great chance to cast interesting contemporary actors together for our version of that kind of movie. It’s a fun and entertaining way to do it.’

‘Actually we never really thought of this as a war film. It was a heist film. And then, the first day, we got to the set, and everybody put on their uniforms and helmets.’

So you can see what they were going for with The Monuments Men. It’s sad that the achievement isn’t as big as the ambitions, because if it it was, this would be a five star movie. As it is, it’s kind of a three star film. It moves along quickly and entertainingly. For a long time it seems to be building nicely and going to be ultra special. That never happens. It never catches fire or takes you by the throat.

I think this is a script problem and a tone problem. Clooney needed to press the comedy button much harder with the lighter hearted moments, really give Murray and Balaban a funny double act to play out. As it is, it is very nice and well played by good people but all a bit tepid and underwhelming, like the film.

Clooney needed to press the tragedy button much harder with the story’s darker moments, really milk his theme of the death, waste and appalling nature of war, bring in a terrible sense of immediate danger and doom. The film has hardly any of this. It’s very war light. Maybe that’s because ‘we never really thought of this as a war film’ when that’s what it is. It’s certainly not a heist film either, though it could take lessons from the Ocean’s Eleven films in terms of tone and excitement.

Another frustrating thing about the movie is its comparative lack of sophistication as a deep-thinking movie. It bites off some big issues, but doesn’t seem to want to go into them too deeply for fear of alienating audiences, who’d probably prefer a fun heist movie. Clooney and co are clever folk, so I’m guessing this is deliberate.

What is unexpected is the film’s very American-centred point of view and pro-American stance. It’s like the Yanks were coming in and not only saving the world but also its art when the rest of us were making a useless hash of it. Clooney and Damon have made films seriously critical of some American values, so this is a surprise.

Nevertheless, this is an entertaining, good-hearted and well-spirited film. Clooney ensure that it is extremely smooth and polished. The just under two hours rush entertainingly by. There’s hardly a dull moment, or even a clunky one, and many tense and enjoyable ones.

Of course the movie wouldn’t be anything like as entertaining without the great cast of ‘interesting contemporary actors’, who do their damnedest to try to make you at least involved with the characters and the issues of life and death, art and culture. In fact, just like in the Ocean’s films, the cast entirely make and save the film, even if they aren’t seen at their best.

Damon and Blanchett are entirely fine, but unusually seem a shade uneasy and underpowered, which is really rare for them. This is symptomatic of the whole film. The actors should light up the screen. These are some of my all-time favourite performers. I expect them to dazzle. But the dimmer switch on their light is turned down.

Blanchett gave one of the best performances of 2013 in Blue Jasmine. She can’t approach that here. Damon’s a real terrier of an actor, one of the screen’s most consistently on-fire performers, but he only smoulders here.

Long story short: even if not at their best, Clooney’s magnificent seven (plus Blanchett) are the most likeable and watchable actors in the business. And even if it disappoints, The Monuments Men is a compelling must-see.

Damon says his friendship with Clooney made it easier for him to take orders: ‘It’s actually much easier to be directed by a friend. When you’re partnered with somebody whose a friend you cut out all of the diplomacy which really wastes a lot of time. There’s a whole way you’re supposed to speak to each other on film sets or in theatre, and it’s all about protecting people’s egos. And when you’re working with your friend they just say “That sucked!” There’s a baseline of trust that never comes into question, and you solve the problems a lot quicker.‘

Murray says the reality of war and the atrocities of the Nazi regime is still with the cast: ‘We filmed in this mine where they built the V2 rocket, which would have destroyed London. And to be there to feel the sense of where we are, and we’re representing some people that saved the art. A lot of art was saved by these men. The monster’s master plan of destroying all the art, of destroying the other cities and their civilisations didn’t take place. It’s a blessing.”

Bonneville said he felt incredibly lucky to be representing the British in the movie: ‘There’s only one Brit in it really, in a principal part, and it was really nice of the Americans to let me in.’

In a nice touch, at the end of the movie, the actor playing the old Frank Stokes visiting the Madonna of Bruges is George Clooney’s father, Nick. His last film appearance was in 1958.

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Movie Review

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