Originally slated as a late 2013 release, Grant Heslov and
George Clooney’s World War II heist dramedy “The Monuments Men” was pushed to
the early months of this year, which rarely says anything good about the studio’s
faith in the project. But hey, how could you go wrong with a cast like this
one, comprised of strongly-identifiable, older-aged actors like Bill
Murray, Bob Balaban, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Matt Damon and Cooney
himself. As it turns out, the same reverence towards these actors that
recognized a yearning to see them together in the same flick might also be the
same factor that placed them on an unreachably high pedestal, cased behind glass,
where audiences are nervously asked to carefully observe the film from a safe
distance.
During
the final stages of WW2, art historian Frank Stokes (Clooney) is asked to put
together a scrappy team of other artists, architects and scholars to enter Nazi
occupied France, in search of stolen paintings and sculptures from Europe’s
past. The team is assembled quickly and even rushed into a military basic
training camp before sweeping the bloodied battlegrounds, in search of the timeless
artifacts. As the story progresses some of them are injured, others are killed
and America’s international relations are placed in an opportunity for profound
cooperation.
Concurrently,
James Granger (Matt Damon) is courting a French curator played by Cate
Blanchet, who once worked under the Nazi’s before ending up in jail. Though
Damon’s character is a married man their relationship skirts between
professional and flirtatious, but is ultimately never resolved or rewarded by
the film, much like everything else that happens.
Heslov’s
screenplay and Clooney’s direction is so guarded and safe that this movie
eventually suffocates among all its narrative floatation devices. You can’t help but notice every box being
ticked as the story moves along: humorous fish-out-of-water scenes about old
guys trying to fit into military life, check, secondary unrequited love story,
check, sad moment when a one of the two soldiers who have spent the entire film
learning to get along dies in the other’s arms, check. When these familiar
beats pass by they don’t exactly ruin the overall goal of the picture, but they
never really hit with the intended force of their formal purpose either.
Cliché’s
in a film like this are acceptable as long as the cover band can really jam out
the classics, but unfortunately Clooney doesn’t mine his cliché’s for their
inherent entertainment. Because this
movie is so focused on its message about the importance of preserving our
humanity through art during times of political and economic upheaval—seriously,
Clooney explicates this theme in not one but three separate lengthy speeches—everything else is treated lite
and brief and frustratingly vague. The
film is never as funny as it should be and the cast members, as fabulous as
they are, never seem to be on same page.
With
some thoughtful attention to period set-decoration, crisp cinematography, and a
handful of notable scene-bits, I suppose “The Monuments Men” isn’t all
bad. It’s cute and old-fashioned in a
somewhat obnoxiously knowing way, and it’s important and politically conscious
in an absolutely obvious way. However, as an ensemble piece, the characters are
dreadfully incidental and secondary to the plot’s strict sequencing of events.
One might expect seasoned comedians like Murray and Goodman to spice things up
with some much-needed improv or some creative line-readings but their direction
is so edgeless and their scenes are so repetitively one-note that this movie
only becomes a monument to the film it didn’t have the wherewithal to be.
Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Feb-2014
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