The Monuments Men

As a director, George Clooney makes the kind of movies that I ought to love: historical dramas with a social-political bent and a distinctly old-school style of production. Yet I’ve found all of his films difficult to connect with and ultimately unsatisfying. His latest, The Monuments Men, is no exception. This true-life World War II adventure story about platoon of aging art experts is tasked by FDR to rescue European masterpieces stolen by Hitler and protect remaining artistic treasures from Allied bombings, should play like an exhilarating hybrid of The Dirty Dozen and Space Cowboys--a Raiders of the Lost Ark for the 40+ crowd. But Clooney’s abilities as a wrtier/director don’t seem to match his ambitions. Like his previous films The Ides of March and Good Night and Good Luck, both co-written by his producing partner Grant Heslov, The Monuments Men never gets past its own self-important ideals and down to the brass tacks of effective storytelling. As an audience, we can see there’s an interesting tale here as well as a noteworthy theme, but we don’t get invested in either because the characters don’t move us.

For the audience not to care about the characters when Clooney and Heslov have assembled such a strong cast is quite a knock against their screenplay. In addition to Clooney, the unit is made up of Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban, and Hugh Bonneville. Yet from the opening “assembling-the-team” montage that movies like this often delight in, we can instantly tell this just isn’t going to be a memorable picture. Each character introduction is about as much fun as picking your dad up at the airport. Even the potential pleasure of seeing Murray in an army comedy 33 years after Stripes is squandered. In fact nearly every opportunity for humor seems intentionally dodged, even though the film presents itself as a comedy/adventure picture. Its as if Clooney fears that laughs will sabotage his movie’s message. This odd tonal uncertainty is The Monuments Men’s biggest weakness. Its second biggest problem is an underwritten subplot featuring Cate Blanchett as a museum curator who witnesses priceless paintings being destroyed, or plundered for Hitler’s personal museum. Her relationship with Damon’s nauseatingly pure-of-heart character rings embarrassingly false. I couldn’t help but think of Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds over and over while watching this movie, especially during the Blanchett sequences which have similarities to Mélanie Laurent’s storyline in that film. It is amazing how Tarantino's broad fantasy is able to find infinitely more truth about the fate of art in the time of war than this authentically historical picture. I also thought of John Frankenheimer’s WWII adventure picture The Train from 1964, in which Burt Lancaster plays a kind of unofficial Monuments Man.

My final complaint may be nit picking, but it sums up why this picture fails. In a scene near the middle of the film, Bill Murray’s character sits in a cold, lonely army barracks somewhere in Europe and listens to a record of his daughter back in the states singing “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.” This is a potentially moving scene and Murray is at his best as an actor when it comes to playing wordless, melancholy moments of this kind. Most people may not be aware of the song’s history--it was written for the 1944 MGM Judy Garland musical, Meet Me in St. Louis, making it a big hit right around the end of the war when The Monument’s Men takes place. However, the daughter sings the revised, “less depressing” lyric that Frank Sinatra commissioned in 1957--a full decade after the war. The new version replaced the line, "Someday soon, we all will be together/If the fates allow/Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow," with “Through the years we all will be together /and if the fates allow/Hang a shining star upon the highest bough.” This oversight would be a minor movie gaff were in not for the fact that the original line is precisely what makes the song so poignant and powerful; it sums up exactly what the families of the men fighting far away from home during WWII, are feeling. The original lyric is what makes that song a work of art rather than just a schmaltzy pop tune. For a film that professes to honor history and celebrate the importance of art to make such a historical and artistic error seems egregiously sloppy.