This movie took a couple a go’s to finish. The first time I could not hold attention, and the second was pure will power.
The Monuments Men came out on the heels of a strong couple of years for Clooney. His directorial mojo restored following the modest success of Ides of March, the same year he had starred in The Descendants, which had been a critical and commercial success. In 2012 he produced the Oscar-winning Argo and the following year, Clooney took a supporting role in Gravity, which became a huge hit. Not all of these projects were his films, but hits are hits.
On the face of it, The Monuments Men sounds like a Clooney project - it is based on a book about a true story, it is a smaller tale sandwiched in an important historical era, and it features a topline cast of big names.
That might be the best compliment I can give The Monuments Men: If nothing else, Clooney is a great curator of talent.
Clooney also co-wrote the film with his producing partner Grant Heslov, and takes a lead role as Lieutenant Frank Stokes, the leader of the group.
The Monuments Men may be based on a great story, but this film cannot make its mind up about which story it is.
The film starts out at a clip as Clooney narrates a slideshow for the US president, explaining why this mission is important. It is vintage Clooney, an authoritative voice laying out knowledge. We then get a montage showing him assembling the team.
An early sign of trouble is that the film repeatedly cuts away to Cate Blanchett, a French art curator who is trying to keep tabs on the artwork that the Nazis are moving out of Paris. These scenes are important for context, and provide some stakes initially, but as the movie progresses, the film criss-crosses between so many different characters on different missions that the film loses all sense of momentum or coherence.
It feels like a spin on the old World War 2 movies in which an ensemble of big names fought the Nazis, except everyone ends up on separate missions - and with eight lead characters, that is a problem.
And while the cast are an interesting lineup, they are stuck in sketches of potentially interesting roles. The film is spread so thin I had trouble figuring out their personalities and relationship dynamics, beyond Bob Balaban not getting on with Bill Murray.
And it feels like the movie is in such a hurry that we only get snippets of scenes. The film often feels like a series of vignettes rather than a propulsive story.
There are a few moments which work - Hugh Bonneville’s Donald Jeffries gets one truncated scene where he single-handedly tries to protect Michelangelo's Madonna of Bruges from the Nazis, and is killed.
The character has been positioned as a recovering alcoholic, and the scene is meant to give him an arc, but it feels underwritten.
Avenging his death becomes the film’s one thread as Stokes and co. search for the Madonna and the cold-blooded Nazi (Holger Handtke) who stole it.
The film makes some moves to making him an antagonist - he is later shown burning artworks, to frustrate the Monuments Men - but the film is so obsessed with covering the expanse of the war that any attempt at direct conflict is lost.
The movie is frustrating in its lack of focus. It often feels like it could have been sliced up into a series of movies, showing specific characters engaged in specific actions - Jeffries protecting the Madonna; Claire Simone (Cate Blanchett) tracking artwork under the Nazi’s noses; Claire working with American agent James Granger (Matt Damon) to recover the art; the team racing to save a salt mine’s worth of treasure from a competing Red Army unit.
They could each be movies, with clear objectives and room for character development. Instead, we get a collection of moments.
And because everything gets the same weight, nothing feels important.
Was it worth sacrificing these men for the sake of art, the President asks at the end.
You wouldn’t know from The Monuments Men.
A slow, meandering bore of a picture,The Monuments Men is the worst Clooney picture I have watched thus far.
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