The Monuments Men is a baffling film with zero tension, drive, or plot other than a great premise and an all-star cast. It is the exact opposite of entertaining.
I would call myself a pretty simple guy when it comes to films and movies. Entertain or move me, regardless of whatever cheap tricks you might employ, and I will walk out totally satisfied with the experience. I will watch highly intellectual films and lowbrow comedies alike, but all of them do something fundamentally different; it’s when you hit that middling middle that I tend to dose off, or lose interest. I can’t emphasize enough how low my standards really are for most entertainment; it’s only when I write or think about something in-depth that I start to notice flaws.
The Monuments Men presents us with such a film that I could not stop me thinking about it constantly. Its flaws remain bare and apparent throughout the movie, and I almost dozed off (the people watching it with me weren’t so lucky…) I don’t deny that George Clooney looks like a star from the Golden Age of Hollywood, or that his directorial work tends to function like it came out of a different era (a better one, perhaps), but the movie’s whole plot cannot rest on a foregone conclusion. The Monuments Men story, of course, sounds like a great movie just from the thought of it! A group of men set out to collect and retrieve the artistic works which the Third Reich stole from the countries they occupied, and events proceed along in this manner until they find them. That I can’t really even spoil the movie should tell you the first sign of bad plotting: I literally felt zero tension during any event in the whole film. I almost felt like I was watching an episode of Law and Order, basically just waiting for two hours until everything works out for everybody. Great! Why bother watching, then?
Furthermore, with an ensemble cast like this, it’s easy for most of the people to get lost in the shuffle. Most of them receive a few scenes of dialogue, and apparently we must rely on the previous works of the actors involved to insert a personality. They never establish a reason to care about any of these people on their quest to retrieve art, and we rarely see them in any hardships; when Jean Dujarden dies (sorry, SPOILERS I guess), I honestly couldn’t care less. George Clooney’s horrible script provided no reason TO care. When a film packs ten main characters into two hours, you can only paint in broad brush strokes, but those brush strokes need to present a vibrant picture (see: Ocean’s Eleven movies). Here, there’s just a whole lot of nothing. Little episodic vignette after episodic vignette plays out, with little to distinguish these events as important nor a solid timeline as to how long it took. The struggle to find some of civilization’s greatest works before Hitler destroyed them sounds like a fascinating premise, and yet who could care? The way they find it, furthermore, is wholly uninteresting and provides us with almost nothing to enjoy. Yay, they tracked it down! Nay, they don’t make this process exciting in any way! Clearly, something went wrong in translation to the silver screen.
All the while, George Clooney’s character grandstands about the importance of ART and CULTURE to…who, exactly? I guess his fellow academics, but more than likely Clooney speaks directly to the audience. In effect, we end up with Clooney sermonizing about things to which I hesitate to say anyone would disagree. I mean, who would want art destroyed? What message do we mean here? If the message needs to be said, use the MOVIE and not WORDS WORDS WORDS to convey that message. Clooney apparently didn’t think so, and thus we ended up with a bloated script full of IMPORTANT THINGS THROUGHOUT. Add that to the lack of caring about anyone in the film, and things quickly get old. It gives none of these actors anything to use, and by default makes for an incredibly boring film. I mean, any movie that somehow wastes Bill Murray deserves punishment, in my view.
Some say that this movie is intentionally “retro”, trying to capture the appeal of old war movies which didn’t show much violence but did show heroic men on the front lines, clear good/evil dynamics, and a whole lot of wonderful cliche tropes that people expected. I’m fine with that sort of thing; I like a lot of the older war movies, simply because they take the time to outline the personalities behind such violent actions rather than the horrors of war itself. Limitations on technology at the time meant they couldn’t bedazzle the audience with special effects, so actual plots and characters filled the holes just like in the fiction of days past.
Unfortunately, that means that The Monuments Men needs to live up to the classics of the genre in some way (The Bridge on the River Kwai, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Longest Day, etc) just by virtue of comparison and similarity in tone. They spent seventy million dollars on a film that recreates World War II-era aesthetics, and yet doesn’t even come close to the classics of the genre. Nobody retains that same wit and charm of the past; The Monuments Men just misses something, and I am unsure what that something is. Cohesion? Pacing? The possibility of defeat? I don’t know. Whatever happened in the production of this film, nobody was thinking about making a good movie, or just seemed too full of themselves or the concept to form something truly enjoyable.
