The Monuments Men (***)
Directed
by: George Clooney
Starring:
George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob
Balaban, Hugh Bonneville, Cate Blanchett, Sam Hazeldine, Dimitri Leonidas, Nick
Clooney
Seen:
February 14th 2014
***
Out of ****
The
Monuments Men was supposed to be released a few months earlier, to be in time
for consideration for the Academy Awards. It was however mysteriously delayed
to a January release, usually a bit of a graveyard in terms of movie releases. This
took it out of contention for the 2014 Oscars, and after seeing it, I can in a
way understand this move. What was supposed to be something great is merely
good, the expected brilliance is somehow not there, even though the director
and cast and based-on-true-events (but fictionalised) story promised so much
more, it delivers a good movie, not a great one.
During
World War II, the Germans had a side-mission, ordered by Hitler himself –
steal/obtain all the art they could possibly get for the Fuhrer’s massive
museum he planned to build after winning the war. As the Allies started to
really push back the Nazi’s though, Hitler gave the additional command that all
art that the Germans could not hold on to should be destroyed. Enter Frank
Stokes (George Clooney), who persuades the US President to commission a team of
specialists to hunt for the stolen art, and to recover whatever they can,
restoring it to the rightful owners. He recruits a few oddball characters in
James Granger (Damon), Walter Garfield (Goodman), Jean Claude Clermont
(Dujardin), Richard Campbell (Murray), Preston Savitz (Balaban), and Donald
Jeffries (Bonneville).
While
the group searches for clues as to where the art is stored by the Germans, the
focus of the movie follows certain specific art pieces that hold something dear
for the characters. There’s the Van Eyck altarpiece from the Ghent cathedral
and Madonna and Child by Michelangelo getting special attention, but they are
also still part of a larger search to recover an entire culture, to not let it
go to waste in war. Granger approaches the French museum curator Claire Simone
(Blanchett) for help, and once he gets her to trust him as not just another art
looter, she proves to be massively helpful in their efforts. This is war
however, and the team run into tragedy as time progresses and the end of the
war comes nearer.
The
Monuments Men is, if I may say so, a sweet war movie, and that is part of what
steals from the movie in my humble opinion. George Clooney aims for some of
what made the Ocean’s movies so great, and while he achieves it to some extent,
it is lost in the haze of war as the comedy and seriousness of war cannot truly
coexist. The subject matter is just a little too heavy for a quasi-comedy, but
too light to be seriously seen as a genuinely great war movie. The movie fails
to capture that which made Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful such a
masterpiece, and even though I really enjoyed The Monuments Men, even though it
is quite a good movie, I do not think I will remember it too far into the
future.
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