The Monuments Men

George Clooney's The Monuments Men is a movie of many small achievements.  It doesn't really work as a fully cohesive narrative, but it has a lot of great small moments and wonderful performances, and I am recommending it on that strength.  Usually, when a movie is bumped from its prime December release date, and moved to February (as what happened to this film), it shows a lack of confidence from the studio.  Yet, I feel it was a smart move.  This film, entertaining enough as it is, wouldn't have stood a chance amongst the prestige pictures that came out late last year.

Clooney (who also directed and co-wrote the film) stars as Frank Stokes, a man tasked during the later days of World War II to retrieve pieces of priceless art that have been stolen by the Nazis to either be destroyed, or added to Hitler's collection, which he plans to display in a grand museum yet to be built.  Frank gathers a team of specialists in the arts and architect fields, including James Granger (Matt Damon), Richard Campbell (Bill Murray), Preston Savitz (Bob Balaban), Walter Garfield (John Goodman), Jean Claude Clermont (Jean Dujardin), and Donald Jeffries (Hugh Bonneville).  Their mission is to infiltrate France and Germany, and try to find information that will lead them to where the art has been hidden.  The men split up into small groups, and take on various individual missions, which proves to be the film's main weak point.  Since this team of men hardly ever work as a whole group, we never get a real sense of comradeship that we usually get in war movies.

And yet, a lot of the small stories centered around these individual men are tremendously entertaining at times, and Clooney manages to get a lot of memorable moments.  That's ultimately what made the film, flawed as it is, work with me.  Some of the best individual moments involve the scenes where Damon's Granger must earn the trust of a French museum employee, Claire Simone (Cate Blanchett).  She has personally witnessed the Nazis treatment of the priceless art, and does not know who to trust, not even the Americans, afraid that they too will keep the treasures that they find.  The plot about Granger and Claire's slowly building friendship is strong enough to probably be a movie in itself, with the performances of Damon and Blanchett being particularly strong here.  Each of the men gets his own small individual storyline, and the plot is constantly hopping around, trying to keep up with it all.

It is this somewhat disjointed nature of the screenplay that holds The Monuments Men back from the greatness it is obviously struggling to achieve.  Clooney and his team obviously had big ambitions here.  The look of the film is gorgeous, and the acting is first rate, which is no surprise given the names this project was able to attract.  In fact, there are some scenes where the performances are able to rise above the sometimes thin material.  These are not exactly richly developed characters.  Heck, Clooney's performance of Frank Stokes is devoted to little more than making grand speeches or monologues about the importance of the mission.  And even though I knew this while I was watching the film, I was still mesmerized, and was never once bored.  The storytelling may be disjointed, but this also means it never lingers too long on one individual moment or character, so it is constantly moving.  This is both a credit and a disservice to the film, I suppose.  It would be nice to get closer to these characters, yet the movie does keep a quick, yet never hurried, pace and never bogs down.

If the movie is never quite strong as a whole due to its narrative problems, then it makes up for it with some beautifully mounted individual moments, such as when Garfield and Clermont have an encounter with a Nazi sniper, or when Campbell and Savitz have a run-in with an enemy soldier who seems just as lost and confused as they are.  It's moments like these, and the performances by the fine actors that lift the movie high enough for me to recommend.  Bill Murray also gets a wonderful quiet moment halfway through the film, where he listens to a recording of a Christmas song that is both touching and heartbreaking without him having to say anything.  It's a wonderful moment, and hints at an even stronger film that this could have been had the script been better organized.

A lot of the reviews I have read for this film seem to be highly negative, and maybe that's because we've come to expect a lot from Clooney, both as an actor and a director.  And while he's not exactly in top form here, he's not just cashing a paycheck here, either.  There's enough to like here in The Monuments Men that I can say I'm glad I watched it, and I think you would find it worth your time if you watched it as well.  Besides, just because a movie is heavily flawed, doesn't mean it has no merit at all.

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