The Half-"Dirty Dozen" Of The Art World

Rating: 10/10 (19 February 2014)

Among the many horrific things about Adolf Hitler and his nightmarish visions of a Third Reich, which began with destroying everything Jewish (including the Jewish people themselves, of course), was the fact that the German army, under his orders, was stealing every piece of art from every museum in Europe, intending to display them all in his so-called "Fuhrer Museum" in his hometown of Linz, Austria or, in case of his country falling to the Allies or him being found dead, to burn and destroy all of that art, thus eliminating one thousand years of human history and creativity from the books. Into this fray stepped a half-dozen Americans with backgrounds in art. They are the subject of what is one of the best World War II-era films of recent vintage, THE MONUMENTS MEN, based on the book of the same name by Robert M. Edsel and Bret Witter.
George Clooney, who co-wrote and co-produced the film as well as directed it, is the man leading the charge to save as much of this priceless art as is humanly possible before Hitler and his goons send it to the flames. Matt Damon, John Goodman, Bob Balaban, Bill Murray, Hugh Bonneville and Jean Dujardin are the art experts that go along with him on this mission, a mission that began within a month of the D-Day landings that commenced the liberation of Europe. In short order, they manage to recover many great works of art stolen from the great art museums in Amsterdam and Paris, with some of the information coming from the contact that Damon makes with a French art curator and resistance member (Cate Blanchett). But they soon learn that huge quantities of art are being stored in various mine shafts in the interior of Germany, making their task even more pressing, and especially given that Hitler's defeat is nigh. In getting into the heart of Germany, going along with convoys of U.S. and Allied forces, the team must engage in firefights with German soldiers they had hoped to avoid. Finally, they get to the mine complex where the biggest and most important works of art in human history have been stored and hidden by the Nazi regime. And they don't have very long to get it.
Clooney and his co-writer/co-producer Grant Heslov would be forgiven if they had designed this as a combination of World War II "impossible mission" films like STALAG 17, THE GREAT ESCAPE, and THE DIRTY DOZEN with various "heist" movies; but since this is a true story that few people in the world had ever heard about prior to the publication of the book the film is based on, it adds realism to the piece. Instead of being tough-nosed hard cases like we've seen in many classic World War II movies, the men involved, even Clooney, are closer to the "Everyman" archetype that most audiences can readily identify with the best. The film is not without its moments of humor, of course, given that solid seriocomic actors like Goodman and Murray are involved; but Clooney doesn't avoid some of the slightly grimmer aspects of the story either, such as the discover of a whole satchel full of gold fillings, knocked out of the teeth of Jews in the concentration camps. Some of the laconic dialogue among the guys is reminiscent of what we got in THE GREAT ESCAPE; and even the score by Alexandre Desplait has a main title theme that has the jauntiness of Elmer Bernstein's score for that classic 1963 film.
All the cast performs admirably in the film, especially Clooney, given the fact that he is doing double duty being both in front of and behind the camera. Although the horrors of war are largely de-emphasized, the scenes of the bombed-out and burned-out French and German towns do have the feel of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. Clooney and Heslov also give the Germans a more nuanced but no less frightening portrait of venality and greed in the manner of what we saw in SCHINDLER'S LIST or CROSS OF IRON; they are not all the stereotypical goose-stepping goons. And while it is never easy to talk about too much of what went on during World War II as being "good" in the standard sense, THE MONUMENTS MEN is a film that proved that it's possible. Given that its subject is about saving the greatest works of art of the entire human race from the madness of one man's dreams of global empire and destruction, that is indeed saying a lot about us as a race that can only be described as "good."