Because earth without art is just "eh"

Rating: Null/10 (10 November 2014)

George Clooney directs "The Monuments Men". The plot? Clooney plays Frank Stokes, a Lieutenant in the United States Army tasked with assembling a team of soldiers, museum curators and art historians. Their mission? Proceed into Nazi occupied France and rescue precious works of art from the hands of looting Germans.
Like Clooney's 2008 film, "The Leatherheads", "The Monuments Men" is an attempted throwback to Old Hollywood. Unfortunately the result is dull, shapeless and populated by tired, ageing actors, all of whom look like they wish to be elsewhere. Clooney casts Bill Murray and John Goodman, hoping that the duo might provide a little comedic spark, but no luck. Everyone's on life support.
Elsewhere the film disgorges familiar WW2 mythology. Here Americans are the ultimate saviours of European lives and culture, rather than architects of wanton destruction and global looting campaigns of their own. Along these lines the film functions as a dramatically inept version of "Saving Private Ryan", another men-on-a-mission movie which specialised in bulldozing history. The straw-man of "Saving Private Ryan's" final sequence, in which civilians are asked whether they've "earned the sacrifices of dead soldiers", is even replicated in "The Monuments Men". Here we're asked whether any work of art is ever worth a soldier's life. "Yeah," an elderly man replies for us. The answer is not just creepy, but obfuscates the larger realities of war and soldiering, which oft have little to do with lofty ideals; only lies need constant veneration.
And so by its final act, it becomes clear that Clooney intends "The Monuments Men" to be a giant love letter to art. Art, the film argues, is "very important", and so by extension movies too (and we actors as well!). Such a stance is fine, but in the context of WW2's killing fields, nevertheless wholly conceited. This narcissism perfectly echoes most Greatest Generation mythology.
4/10 – See John Frankenheimer's "The Train", an excellent "art heist" flick, also set at the height of World War 2. See too "Kelly's Heroes", "Decision Before Dawn" and Sydney Pollack's underrated "Castle Keep", also about wartime art preservation.