The Monuments Men Review
I’m at a loss as to whether I like it or not.
Image courtesy of the Monuments Men Official Web Site.
On paper it seems like I should love this film. It has some of my favorite actors in it. Clooney, Goodman, Murray, and Damon rock. Kate Blanchet is very easy on the eyes, even when playing a stuck up Parisian. I love World War II movies. I love movies from real stories. I studied art and in spite of many hours of painful Art History lessons I love art.
So why am I not gushing all over this film? This is one of those movies that is going to suffer the death of 1,000 cuts. There is no one thing that brings it down but rather a million little pinpricks that cause it to bleed all over the screen. It’s hard to nail down but there is just something off about it.
I suppose I should have had some warning when they started running trailers for this film almost a year ago. In the bizarre idiot savant genius that is only enjoyed by Hollywood studio marketing departments the ad people can sniff out a dud far in advance and start advertizing the crap out of it, hoping to pin the movie in the minds of the audience before actual word of mouth poisons it. Ever notice that the really great films hardly advertize at all? I know I am more sensitive to this as I see every movie out there and have watched the Monuments Men trailers about 800 times but I just don’t understand how it is the marketing people can feel a bad movie coming on like an impending bowel blockage but the directors, producers, and studio executives keep packing away the cheese and red meat.
Not to say that this film is bad. It’s just mediocre, and given the tools they had that makes it very disappointing. If you enter the Indy 500 in a ’79 Thunderbird no one is going to blame you for coming in dead last. However if you enter it in the latest hi tech Formula 1 car and spend the whole race doing donuts on the midway I think some of the failure blame may land fairly in your lap.
This film has the stench of a pet project on it, and since it was written by, directed by, and starred in by the same man I think we can guess who’s pet it is. The biggest identifiable problem is that he honestly tried to do too much in all ways. He has some of the best character actors in the business but didn’t have the time to actually let any of them develop a character, leaving them all bizarrely flat and one dimensional. He tried to add some away from home angst in a really out of place scene that added nothing (which was exacerbated by the fact that without any character development we didn’t care about Bill Murray’s character enough for it to have impact). The film was a “sort of” project. It was sort of a war movie, sort of a buddy movie, sort of a romantic drama, sort of a National Treasure-esque treasure hunt, sort of a Holocaust movie, sort of a celebration of the French resistance, sort of a historical drama, sort of a character study, and sort of an action drama. Unfortunately it did none of those particularly well.
Image courtesy of the Monuments Men Official Site
Also unfortunately it was sort of boring. Drama and dialog only work if there are characters for us to connect with, and with our focus split six different ways the drama had zero impact. The war action in this war movie was perfunctory at best. There were only two “battle” scenes, one of which ended comedically, and both of them were criminally short with no gravitas. The one death scene was the character we had the least connection to (and that is saying a lot). I honestly think that with a few tweaks this film could have gotten a PG rather than PG-13 rating to allow the next generation to get bored too.
I can almost see the arguments wherein an executive producer is begging and cajoling Clooney to include one stinking battle scene and George is refusing to sully the vision of his opus. The entire last half of the movie seems to be gearing up towards a big confrontation with the closest thing to an antagonist, the Russian treasure hunter, but the exact moment when a veteran movie goer expects the scene instead we get a shot of the guys driving across the German countryside into Blue Ball City.
The story is of the Monuments Men, a group of soldiers tasked by President Roosevelt to save and recover great pieces of art stolen by the Germans. They are led by art professor Frank Stokes (George Clooney-Gravity, Oh Brother, Where Art Thou, Up in the Air) and artist James Granger (Matt Damon-Saving Private Ryan, Good Will Hunting, the Departed). The team is comprise of architect Richard Campbell (Bill Murray-Moonrise Kingdom, Groundhog Day, Lost in Translation), sculpture Walter Garfield (John Goodman-Monsters, Inc, Argo, the Big Lebowski), painter Preston Savitz (Bob Balaban-Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Moonrise Kingdom, Gosford Park), British guy Donald Jeffries (Hugh Bonneville-Downton Abbey, Tomorrow Never Dies, Notting Hill), and French guy Jean Claude Clermont (Jean Dujardin-the Artist, the Wolf of Wall Street, 99 francs).
They go out into the world and split up in order to have 14 more WWII subplots. None of the individual scenes really have much to do with the main story and could be taken as individual vignettes. James Granger heads into Paris (which may or may not have been occupied. Timing seemed really vague in this film) to meet up with an old art contemporary Claire Simone (Cate Blanchett-LOTR, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Blue Jasmine). She worked with the Nazi in charge of stealing all the art Viktor Stahl (Justus Von Dohnanyi-The World is Not Enough, Downfall, the Experiment) and has information that would really help the Monuments Men find the art (sort of. Honestly after about half the movie wooing the info out of here I thought it pretty worthless) but for some inexplicable reason would rather let Hitler burn it all or something. I guess to help create drama?
Anyway Jeffries wanders off to find a Michelangelo sculpture and gets shot (supposedly. From what I saw the sound of the Germans pistol might have given him a cardiac arrest. PG-13 and all that). Garfield and Clermont wander around the countryside and stumble upon some Germans who shoot the Frenchman (as an aside, if you weren’t American in this film your days were numbered). Savitz and Campbell stumble upon Stahl in what is easily the best scene in the film and arrest him. Stokes and crew start finding art hidden in salt mines and the like. Meanwhile an evil Russian team is also looking for art to steal. Both teams seem to be headed towards the same Bavarian castle and copper mine where the greatest art piece ever is stored and in a truly edge of the seat, leave finger prints imbedded in the armrest from gripping it so hard scene the Americans leave with all the art about ten minutes before the Russians arrive. The end.
The stars.
You cannot help but love the cast. Even in mediocre movies they shine like diamonds. I was especially glad to see Bill Murray again. Three stars. Based on a true story. One star. I like the idea that some art is worth risking your life to save. There was a noble overriding message I can’t help but appreciate. One star. WWII movies hearken me back to one of the few positive interactions I can recall with my father, who loved WWII. One star. If you go in looking for more history than drama and action you will enjoy it. One star. Total: seven stars.
The black holes.
The tonal shift really kept throwing me out of the theater. It was like watching the first ten minutes of seven different films over and over again. One black hole. The lack of any kind of real character development and the fact that they split all the character time between six or seven different characters meant I never connected with any of them. I felt more sadness seeing some great works of art burned then I did seeing the two dudes die. You can’t give me two minutes to form a bond with a character and then expect me to give a damn when he dies. 
I’ve had stronger connections with individual Stormtroopers (Trooper image courtesy of the Star Wars T Shirt category). One black hole. Pacing was awful. 118 minutes of Act II with no real conclusion, no continuity, and no connection to the rest of the war. You jumped from scene to scene with a little subtitle placard and were expected to buy into the fact that we didn’t need to see anything in between. The film doesn’t feel like it ended so much as they just ran out of film. One black hole. The Claire Simone segments were particularly worthless. She contributed next to nothing besides a pretty female face in a sea of dudes. What was her motivation? Did we need to learn about her brother? Was the data she gave them really of any value in the long run? Was she a love interest or not? One black hole. No action to speak of. They bought all the guns and uniforms. Didn’t they feel any interest in at least having one thing remotely exciting happen? One black hole. They ripped off about 80 other WWII and treasure hunt movies. You know that trope where a guy steps on a mine but it won’t go off until he takes his weight off of? The one in every bad war movie ever? Well apparently so does George Clooney. One black hole. Total: six black holes.
So a total of one star, which in my book is a very mediocre score. I don’t know. Maybe my mom will love it, but honestly I think Clooney needs to have a more concrete vision of what his next movie is supposed to be before starting it.. Having a movie about art suddenly shift into finding 50 gallon drums full of gold teeth collected from concentration camps speaks loudly of “Late Night Inspiration Disease” where the writer/director/star of this masterpiece spends the evening watching Schindler’s List and wakes up at 3am in a creative sweat and writes down the first thing that comes to mind on his bedside legal pad. Worth seeing? I will say it’s not worth not seeing. If there is nothing else on and you roll into the theater with your expectations set low enough you will probably enjoy it. Odds are the biggest problem facing my enjoyment of it was the 800 Monuments Men trailers I have watched over the last 14 months. Sometimes advertizing can have a negative effect. Date movie? Meh. I suppose. This is one of those perfect relationship date movies where you and your significant other will feel equally annoyed at the film for different reasons. A good compromise always leaves both parties vaguely dissatisfied. Bathroom break? There is a date scene with Claire towards the end that could be missed without much impact.
Thanks for reading. I’m still riding the high I felt from watching the Lego Movie, but have Vampire Academy on deck for tonight so by this time tomorrow should be back to my miserable self (unless Vampire Academy surprises me by being good and fun to watch, but that would be a moot point as by the time I got to writing the review all causality would have already imploded). Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu. Comments on this film or my review are invited and can be left here. Off topic questions or suggestions can be emailed to [email protected]. Have a great night.
Dave
