Near the end of The Monuments Men, one of the soldiers assigned to rescue priceless works of art from the Nazis in World War II steps on a landmine. He can’t step off of the landmine or it will explode. Most directors would consider that a pretty suspenseful scene. George Clooney, on the other hand, thinks it’s adorable.
Clooney, who also co-wrote and co-stars in The Monuments Men, just doesn’t seem terribly eager to entertain us. He films the events with class, he casts endearing actors and he genuinely seems to believe that the preservation of art and culture is at least comparably valuable to the preservation of individual human lives. He’s so damned convinced, in fact, that he barely bothers to challenge the assumption. The heroes of his film never have to decide between one or the other, at least as far as other people are concerned, and since they’re all art lovers they approach the film’s sparse moments of activity and violence like dreamy-eyed humanities majors who wandered into the wrong part of campus and don’t know what all this “physical activity” business is about.
There’s no reason to suspect that George Clooney was aiming for anything loftier than a drowsy stroll through his non-fiction library. He used to have more passion for that library, energetically recapping the unlikely parallel between mid-century TV game shows and the Cold War in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and intensely documenting the battle between Edward R. Murrow and the purveyors of the Red Scare in Good Night and Good Luck. But now even that landmine scene plays under a musical score that sounds bemused at the potential victim’s plight, not actually invested in it.
Truth be told, all the violence that befalls The Monuments Men is sporadic, non sequitur and always dispatched with an anti-climax. Their problems are usually solved with polite conversations, not action, and even the far-too-late-to-be-interesting appearance of a competing team of Russian treasure hunters goes nowhere. If anything could have saved The Monuments Men from feeling like a secondhand World War II story told by your grandfather’s best friend who wasn’t there but wants to be supportive anyway, it would have been an active antagonist trying to stop these American heroes from accomplishing their mission, or at least trying just as hard to swipe the Ghent altarpiece for themselves, like a nationalistic version of Belloq from Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The only thing keeping The Monuments Men from being as dull as an elementary school field trip is the film’s cast, who make the most of their underdeveloped characters or at least coast on personality. George Clooney is a little more pensive than usual, and prone to making important sounding speeches, but he’s still George Clooney damn it. Charming to the last. Matt Damon has a thankless role as a Monuments Man stuck miles away from the front, trying to convince Cate Blanchett that these priceless artifacts should be trusted to America because at least one American is kind of pleasant, but he’s still Matt Damon damn it. You could say something similar about co-stars Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, John Goodman and Jean Dujardin, who are the beneficiaries of playful banter but the victims of a plot that usually needs to digress just to keep them on screen.
If there’s a lesson to be learned from The Monuments Men it’s that every World War II story is probably very important, but that doesn’t necessarily make it interesting. George Clooney strips his tale of all the urgency inherent to a race against time, transforming the film’s very real threats into vague “what ifs” that drive the story forward and yet have no effect on how it’s actually told. The film plays like a loving homage to George Clooney’s Saturday afternoons of watching The History Channel and drinking dry sherry. I don’t mind being invited to join him, I just hope he won’t mind if I take a catnap on his couch.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
