Not a great movie, but still worth seeing for the story - because the book on which it is based does not tell one story

Rating: 5/10 (15 February 2014)

This movie got a poor review in the Cleveland paper from a reviewer I trust. Still, the subject interested me, and I've seen George Clooney directed movies that I loved, like "Good Night and Good Luck," so I went anyway.
This is not another "Good Night and Good Luck. The cast is impressive, but the script doesn't build any tension until near the end, by which time it is too late.
Comparison to John Frankenheimer's "The Train" is inevitable, and not flattering. In that movie, the defense of art is given to the curator of the Jeu de paume museum - Cate Blanchett's character here - and not to an American. Indeed, the American in Frankenheimer's movie, Burt Lancaster's character, can't buy her argument. The French curator argues that the art must be saved because it is part of French national culture, because it expresses what the French have been. (The script of *The Train* was adapted from *The Art Front*, the memoires of Rose Valland, the woman who had worked in the Jeu de pomme museum during the Occupation.) Here it is an American who argues the importance of art in general, and that it very different.
His argument is much more universal, which is to say that art is where man has been in the past. That's true, of course, but much less gut-wrenching, less immediate, less concrete. The French curator in "The Train" explains how so much else has been taken away from the French during the Occupation; they cannot allow their art, who they have been and therefore part of who they are now, to be taken away as well. The threat presented through George Clooney's character to FDR is less immediate. If the Germans take this art, nothing will happen to Americans and their culture in particular. It very much speaks to the different role art plays in American culture, as opposed to some European and Asian cultures.
This difference is brought out by the art that gets named in each movie. In "The Train," the curator of the Jeu de paume lists the French painters whose works the Germans are about to remove from Paris. In "Monuments Men," the work that gets the greatest attention is a Michelangelo statue, a work of Italian art, that is in a Belgian church, i.e., not a work of art that grew out of and expressed Belgian culture. That lack of understanding of the importance of national art to certain European cultures is a definite weakness in this movie. We only get the American perspective.
You see that at the very end. When the mission is over, FDR asks the leader, Clooney's character: "In the future, will anyone care that you risked and gave your lives to save this art?" After that question, we suddenly jump to the future and see Clooney's American art historian character, now elderly, pay a visit to the Michelangelo Madonna that he and his men saved during the war. It's all well and good that the statue should be appreciated by a Harvard art historian. But it would have been much more moving if we had seen locals moved by the sacrifice of these Americans to preserve a part of their art/culture, say the altarpiece that was also saved and that is presented as the essence of Medieval European culture. (Though it is really, at most, an expression of Northern European Medieval culture.)
The end of Frankenheimer's movie also asks the question "Is art worth losing men's lives to save it?", but without providing a clear answer. The last shots, of dead Frenchmen on the ground and then the crates of art the Nazis tried to take back to Germany, present both sides of the argument and refuse to settle it. At the end of this movie, George Clooney's character gives a speech to FDR that provides a positive answer, and it isn't questioned. One is left with the impression that these men risked their lives to save this art because it is important to them and other art historians. Again, there is no connection with a national culture.
Still, this movie is worth seeing. Though I suspect you would be better off reading the book of the same name on which it is named.
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Having now read that book, I repeat that, if you want to know what actually happened, you would be better off reading the book.
However, the movie, I now see, does a remarkable job of drawing a coherent story out of what is a very diffuse tome that would have profited from a LOT of editing. The book tries to create tension and suspense at certain points, but does a poor job of it. It also follows a lot of different threads, but does a poor job of linking them. In short, the book, at over 400 pages, is only for those who really want to know about the history behind this.
If you want a story on this topic, settle for the movie.