The Monuments Men review

                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.

Grade: C-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Feb-2014

Out of the Furnace review

               The characters in Scott Cooper’s “Out of the Furnace” have everything working against them. They’re under paid, they’re incarcerated, they’re deep in debt, they have cancer, and worst of all, they are they are living in the genre confines of a bleak rural noir. Like 2010’s “Winters Bone” or even this year’s “Prisoners”, crime and revenge has bled from the urban streets into the red-neck hills, where the consequences of human betrayal are met with even more brutality.

                Cooper’s follow up to his country music character-study “Crazy Heart” is quite a departure in style.  Even though the understated quietness of his scenery and the subtle direction of his actors are still intact, this movie moves away from the tangible warmth of the county-western bars and plunges deep into a dower underworld of drugs and murder. While Cooper philosophizes on America’s post Iraq psychology and the economic weight burdened on blue-collar culture, when the plot finally kicks into gear , his film settles confidently into its base interests as a nail-biting, pulp thriller--and an occasionally brassy one at that.

                Christian Bale and Casey Affleck play Russell and Rodney Baze, two brothers who live  in a rust-belt, steel town, and who each have their own crosses to bare. Russell is sent to prison for 5 years after a drunk driving accident and Rodney is sent to war in Iraq, where he hopes to make some money for the family. When Russell is finally set free, he finds his girl (Zoe Saldana) remarried and his brother is forced to lose bare-knuckle boxing matches to pay off his ever growing debt with a local drug syndicate. After Rodney goes missing and the cops are tied-up by jurisdiction to move forward with the case, Russell decides to investigate the rotted underbelly of this dangerous world himself.

                 “Out of the Furnace” isn’t nearly as profound or as A-level as it thinks it is, but the sincerity of the performances and a seat clenching third-act saves it from being an unrelenting downer.  Bale and lil’ Affleck are both effective without overplaying things and their instincts are tuned well enough know which note to play each scene.  Side performances from Willem Dafoe, Sam Shepard and the recently revived Forest Whitaker fill out their roles nicely as well. But it is Woody Harrelson as the tobacco stained, meth-head, hillbilly heavy, who drips with intimidating menace in every scene he steals.

                While spending the first half of the film stacking conflict on top of complication against the protagonists, the story feels a bit loose and shaggy, and slow to get going. But when the pawns have been put into place the despair truck is finally done unloading, all of this character work pays off in an old fashion man-hunt.  The violence is treated just a blunt as the emotions are approached with tenderness and the mechanics of the cat and mouse set-piece’s between Bale and Harrelson and genuinely exciting and unpredictable. 

                If you can wade through the woe-is-me grunge in all of it, there’s a half-way decent revenge movie to enjoy in here. I can’t say Cooper gives us anything we haven’t seen somewhere else done better—“No County For Old Men” and the Aussie gangster film  “Animal Kingdom” comes to mind—but sometimes when you get a respectable director and talented cast together you can end up with something pretty watchable.

Grade: B -

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2013