DIRECTOR: George
Clooney LEAD CAST:
George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill
Murray, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban, Hugh Bonneville, Cate Blanchett SCREENWRITER: George
Clooney & Grant Heslov PRODUCER: George
Clooney & Grant Heslov EDITOR: Stephen Mirrione MUSICAL DIRECTOR: Alexandre Desplat GENRE: Action,
Drama & Adventure CINEMATOGRAPHER: Phedon Papamichael DISTRIBUTOR: Columbia Picture & 20th
Century Fox LOCATION: United States,
Germany RUNNING TIME: 118 minutes
Technical assessment: 3.5
Moral assessment: 3
CINEMA rating: V 14
Based on the book by Robert M. Edsel and Bret
Witter published in 2009 and entitled Allied
Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, The
Monuments Men opens with Adolf Hitler building the grand Fuhrer Museum to
be filled with great art works stolen from all over Europe by the Nazi
soldiers. Hitler has, however,
issued orders to destroy everything should the Reich fall and he die. To find and retrieve the stolen art
works and return them to their rightful owners, Harvard professor Frank Stokes (George Clooney) recruits a
team of seven men, most of whom are past
their prime with hardly any preparation for a mission that will them expose to
real war. His team includes medievalist
James Granger (Matt Damon), architect Richard Campbell (Bill Murray), sculptor Walter
Garfield (John Goodman), Jewish art dealer Jean Claude Clermont (Jean
Dujardin), British scholar Donald Jeffries (Hugh Bonneville), Preston Savitz
(Bob Balaban), and a young German-speaking recruit, Sam Epstein (Dimitri
Leonidas). A woman, Claire Simone
(Cate Blanchett), helps out the team, since as a former secretary of a high
ranking Nazi officer, it was her job to log the whereabouts of the stolen
artworks.
The title The Monuments Men
is the pet name of Army’s Monuments, Fine
Arts, and Archives Program, a group of art historians and experts formed in
1943 to trace and rescue the cultural treasures stolen and stashed away by the
Nazis during their occupation of most of Europe. It is said that in reality there were 350 “monuments
men”. The film’s main attraction
is naturally its visual contents, and it must be said that in this department, The Monuments Men has redeemed itself
with the exquisite reproductions of great art. They appear so real that it won’t be a surprise to hear the
audience gasp in horror as the paintings are torched by Hitler’s troops. While the art works look real, the
story lacks dramatic momentum due to its episodic treatment which prevents the
narrative from cohering and the characters from growing into the flesh and
blood men who in reality had great pride in their mission.
The Monuments Men is refreshing in that, at the end of the day the viewer realizes it is
a war film that is not focused on blood and violence, not on destruction of
human lives, but on the preservation of the life of a civilization. The moral question may be, Is it worth
risking your life to save art works?
The film takes the viewer by the hand and poses another equally
important question: Why are art
works so important? Works of art
not only reflect the artists’ perception of their reality but also mirror an
entire civilization’s state of soul.
Paintings and sculptures are in themselves teachers of history. Towards the end of the film children of
the current generation are shown viewing the artworks restored to their
rightful places in the museum.
CINEMA asks, on the side, if the film’s focus on two works of art—a
multi-paneled painting carted away from a Belgian cathedral (which majestically
opens the movie), and a Michelangelo sculpture of Mary and the child Jesus
(which would demand the life of one of the monuments men protecting it)—is
actually a veiled statement about the value and indelible presence of
Christianity in the development of civilization in Europe? It will be remembered that some years
back there began a move to erase Christianity from history books, to which
Blessed Pope John Paul II remarked that if Christianity were removed from
European civilization, then nothing would remain.
