by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched The Monuments Men, a film which got a lot of hostile reaction from
critics and online reviewers alike and didn’t last long in theatres, but which
turned out to be quite entertaining. The film was based on a real-life squad of
about 350 art experts who were attached to the Allied forces in Europe during
World War II to find out what was happening to the art the Nazis were
expropriating from Jewish collectors as well as musea in the occupied
countries, do what they could to recover it, and also keep the Allied armies
from destroying precious works of arts and the buildings that either contained
them or were themselves historical aesthetic treasures. The movie starred and
was directed and co-written by George Clooney, who cast himself as head of a
seven-person squad of “monuments men” moving through Belgium during the period
between D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge, after various stolen artworks in
general and two pieces in particular: the altarpiece at Ghent, Belgium — described
in the dialogue as the central artwork of Roman Catholic culture (which makes
one wonder what Clooney and his co-writer and co-producer, Grant Heslov, think
the Sistine Chapel and all that other stuff in Vatican City is) — and
Michaelangelo’s statue of the Madonna and Child in Bruges, also in Belgium.
The
film lasts 118 minutes — actually relatively short for an “A”-list star vehicle these days — and
suffers from a couple of problems that usually bother me more than they did
here: an uncertainty of tone between drama and comedy (the bouncy main-title
theme by Alexandre Desplat sounds more like the music to the 1963 film The
Great Escape than anything you’d have heard
in a movie about World War II while the war was still going on, and there are
long gag scenes like the one in which Matt Damon’s character has stepped on a
land mine and the other monuments men have to figure out how to get him off
safely) and intensely past-is-brown cinematography by Phedon Papamichael.
Nonetheless, it’s a well-done film, exciting and suspenseful, with a good team
of actors — like other actor-directors, from Stroheim and Welles to Eastwood
and Redford, Clooney knows how to get quiet, understated performances from his
players — and a script that, though perched uneasily between the grimly serious
tone of 1940’s war movies and the ironic, campy approach of ones made in the
1960’s, does tell a compelling story and make, if not the most of it, at least
enough for a good movie. The Monuments Men we see in the film are team leader Frank
Stokes (Clooney), James Granger (Damon), Richard Campbell (a grimly
out-of-shape Bill Murray), Walter Garfield (John Goodman) and the two who,
being non-Americans, are considered expendable and die before the film ends:
Jean-Claude Clermont (Jean Dujardin), who’s killed when the vehicle containing
him and one of the others is fired on by a German sniper who turns out to be a
boy (Samuel Fuller would have been pleased!); and Donald Jeffries (a Brit
played by British actor Hugh Bonneville), who joined the Monuments Men after
losing his career as a university arts professor to some sort of scandal that
Clooney and Heslov never quite explain to us except to say it was
alcohol-fueled. Jeffries is the most dramatically interesting of the Monuments
Men, but the film’s acting honors are taken by Cate Blanchett in what’s by far
the most ambiguous and multi-dimensional role in the film — as Claire Simone
(patterned after the real French art expert Rose Valland, who like her movie
counterpart secretly kept a detailed ledger of all the great artworks in France
the Nazis had looted, which when the Monuments Men started recovering things
proved invaluable to let them know what they had found and what was still
missing).
The Monuments Men does
a pretty good job portraying how the professional military men who had to deal
with these art historians bumbling around in “their” army must have felt — in
one scene a unit commander tells them he’ll be damned if he’s going to write a
letter home to some grieving mother telling her her son died because some art
historian told him not to take out a church tower — and, as in The
Longest Day and some of the more “serious”
World War II films since, the characters speak the languages they would in fact
speak instead of suggesting “Frenchicity” or “Germanicity” by speaking English
with fractured accents. The film also manages to get a lot of suspense out of
its situations — by the end of the film (and the war) the team is racing
against time not only to get the art before the Germans do (Hitler has issued
his so-called “Nero Order” that in case he dies or Germany loses the war everything of value in the country is supposed to be destroyed
— he really did issue orders like this but Albert Speer managed to keep most of
them bottled up within the Nazi bureaucracy and so they never got out to the
people who were supposed to execute them, which is the main reason why when he
was tried at Nuremberg Speer got a 20-year prison sentence instead of the death
penalty) — and we find ourselves enough in tune with the film’s philosophy that
it’s genuinely tragic when a group of Germans burn a stash of art with flame
throwers before the Monuments Men can get to it — but also to make sure they
reach the art before the Russians
do. It’s established that the Russian Army is looting the German art stashes
and taking the stuff home with them as what they call “reparations” — and
indeed much of the historic art of western Europe ended up behind Soviet lines
as World War II ended and the Cold War began. Making the Russians secondary
villains is a bit of a surprise for someone with as “liberal” a reputation as
George Clooney (the man whose film Good Night, and Good Luck largely stopped — at least for now — the American
Right’s attempt to rehabilitate Senator Joe McCarthy), but it works effectively
as drama. It also adds weight to the dilemma faced by Blanchett’s character,
who’s convinced the Americans have come to her not to help repatriate France’s stolen art treasurers
but to grab them for the U.S. — something she tells flat-out to Granger, who is
also the recipient of her invitation for him to have sex with her even though
he protests that he’s not only married, he’s a “good husband.”
Even the
past-is-brown photography didn’t bother me that much because it was clear
Clooney and Papamichael wanted this film to look as much like Old Masters’
paintings as possible — an effect they achieved surprisingly well, which added
weight and visual interest to the movie — and I was also amused that for the
film’s tag scene, showing Clooney’s character visiting the church in Bruges in
1977 to see the Michaelangelo Madonna and Child his team recovered, instead of
having his makeup people slather him in age makeup to make him look
artificially older, he cast his own father, Nick Clooney, as the older version
of himself. It’s an interesting reversal on the practice of stars having their
real-life children play their younger selves on screen (Buster Keaton in Our
Hospitality, Marlene Dietrich in The
Scarlet Empress, Charlton Heston in The
Ten Commandments) and a nice touch even
though I’ve always felt sorry for Nick Clooney in that he’s always stood in the
shadow of a famous relative: first he was Rosemary Clooney’s brother and how
he’s George Clooney’s dad! The rating The Monuments Men got from the Motion Picture Producers and
Distributors of America — the successors to the Production Code Administration
— was also fascinating: a PG-13 “for some images of war violence and historical
smoking” — the latter amusingly shown in a sequence in which one of the team is
undergoing a medical exam and both
doctor and patient are puffing away like chimneys as the exam progresses! It
seems odd The Monuments Men
didn’t do better at the box office because the issues it deals with are still
“live” even 70 years after the end of the war; the heirs of Holocaust victims
and other Jewish victims of Nazi persecution and piracy are still bringing suits to recover artworks stolen from their
families by the Nazis and since either put up for sale for huge amounts or
acquired by respectable musea and displayed either in ignorance or willful
disregard of their sordid past.
