‘Monuments Men’ never quite gets out of its own way
Kyle Arensdorf
February 12, 2014
2/4 stars.
“The Monuments Men” is a confused action-drama-comedy hybrid that, although keeps you entertained, doesn’t quite find its alley.
Art is important. It’s important to retain some remnant of our world’s most creative minds. It’s important to preserve something that can be recreated, but never truly replicated.
But can you illustrate to an audience the importance of art when it seems so trivial against the backdrop of the Holocaust and World War II?
It’s a question that I asked myself in 2009 when the non-fiction book on which the film was based was published. It’s also a point that I think “Monument s Men” failed to convey.
Posed with the task of rescuing the world’s finest art, Frank Stokes (George Clooney) assembles an eight-man team of museum directors and curators to enter Germany in the waning stages of World War II.
After a short stint in basic training, the team split into smaller squads to salvage a few small groups of art.
All while James Granger (Matt Damon), based on a curator from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, was sent to schmooze the curator (Cate Blanchett) of a Paris museum who held key information about the location and contents of the main collection that the Nazis seized.
“Monuments Men,” directed by Clooney, never really hits the emotional level needed to convince its audience that rescuing all of this art is worth the loss of life it’s causing.
If the film’s goal was to operate in a completely separate arena from the realities of the Holocaust, then I think the plot could have succeeded.
But its insistence in hinting at the latter arena constantly works against that goal.
For example, in a pivotal scene toward the end of the film, it was brought to the forefront again in an incongruous display of gloat, just when I thought the narrative had successfully glossed over the elephant in the room.
“Monuments Men” is not a complete mess. The scenery in the film and the sparse comic relief offer a break from the seemingly bleak subject matter and the acting carries the nearly two-hour runtime nicely.
But all in all, “Monuments Men” is a film that never quite gets out of its own way.