Review by C.J. Bunce
It could have been a more serious film for fans of Ocean’s Eleven. It could have been The Dirty Dozen. Unfortunately, writer/director George Clooney missed plenty of opportunities to place The Monuments Men alongside the shelves of great World War II movies of years past. With a cast including Cate Blanchett, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Bob Balaban, and Matt Damon (along with Clooney) this should have been an easy victory. So where’s the miss? Clooney couldn’t decide which movie he wanted to make: a World War II biopic or a comedy. The blend of both results in a merely watchable film, but comes in below the cast’s past works.
If you’ve seen any documentaries on the actual events that inspired the film, you already understand the guiding principle of the story: It is absolutely worth fighting and dying for to preserve those artifacts that define your culture. The Monuments Men is the story of a handful of art experts turned soldiers at the end of WWII who tried to assemble and return to their owners–repatriate–prized works of art, some religious, some by renowned art masters, some paintings, some sculptures, and other cultural artifacts, despite the Nazi efforts to squirrel away and often destroy vast cashes of these looted spoils of war.
The best element of the real-life story is not about any particular Monument’s man, but the actual account of Rose Valland, a French art scholar who covertly kept a log book of where the Nazis in France shipped stolen art. She allowed The Monuments Men to fulfill their mission of returning so much art to rightful owners after war’s end. Like the Valland-inspired Claire Simone, played by Cate Blanchett in the movie, Valland worked in the Jeu De Paume museum in Paris during the Nazi occupation, which was used as the German base of operations for hoarding Europe’s art treasures. Unknown to the Nazis, Valland spoke German, and used this to chronicle the details of the Nazi’s operation. Unfortunately, Valland’s story becomes only a secondary plot to the men of The Monuments Men, and her account is never as exciting as the real-life Valland. In fact, the foreign language intrigue of Valland’s story is completely ignored in the film.
