The Monuments Men

Not too long ago, while on a plane, I watched a documentary about works of art still missing since the Nazis plundered them in the Second World War. It made mention of Rose Valland and the lists she had made, and I thought that the story would make a good film. So, it seemed, did George Clooney, who with his frequent collaborator Grant Heslov has made this as his latest star vehicle.

It hasn’t been very well-received. It is criticised as episodic, poorly-paced and unable to balance its serious tone with its desire to also have a lot of light character-based humour. It’s pretty obvious from start to finish that it’s not a film that’s a stickler for historical accuracy – though perhaps the film’s most bizarre moment, where a random dentist leads the heroes straight to his son, who was one of the more important directors of art theft in the Reich, comes broadly from a real event.

Certainly I had problems here. The characters were underdeveloped, and you can only rely on the very familiar faces of well-loved actors like Bill Murray and John Goodman so far before you start needing to actually give them some depth. Rose Valland’s stand-in here (none of the characters being enough like the originals to keep their names), given the name Claire Simone, started out as an admirably forceful and highly intelligent woman, but it seemed jarringly regressive even for a film about the 40s when Matt Damon came along and she became a coquettish flirt trying to tempt him into infidelity with a ‘what happens in Paris stay in Paris’-style line. And lovely though the concept was, Bill Murray’s character’s wife sending him a recording of ‘Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas’, quite aside from the historical unlikelihood based on when it was released, was sung with such modern inflection towards the end that it entirely took me out of the moment.  

But for all its faults, I actually rather liked The Monuments Men. It may have been marketed as comedic, but it wasn’t really – it was men who understood they had it better than most in a warzone joking about, and mostly in a self-deprecating way. The concept captures the imagination, and raises the question of whether heritage and exceptional artwork can be balanced against the value of a man’s life. There’s a fanciful whimsy to this interpretation, to scenes of French museum archivists yelling threats at Nazi officers as they shoot at her, to a reworking of the story of Ronald E. Balfour to his derived character dying right underneath the Bruges Madonna as the Nazis take it away, but that gives it a kind of weightiness that works in the context of a Hollywood film. There’s just enough truth here to make it compelling, just enough belief in the performances to make it work, and just enough of the moments of abject loss for it to be a believable war pic. There may be a better film in the source material somewhere, but this one wasn’t as bad as you may have heard by a long shot.