George Clooney has an interesting sense of history, be it American history or film history. I tend to think that he means well. He's been a part of numerous "based-on-true-stories" films like Three Kings and The Men who Stare at Goats. He did a moderately amusing tribute to football history (and more precisely old football movies) with Leatherheads. He's also taken risks on remakes of noted films like Ocean's Eleven, and as a tribute to the early days of live television drama, he remade Sidney Lumet's Fail-Safe as a live-tv event. (Worth noting that he was the prime mover in a special live-broadcast episode of E.R., the series that made him a star, before Fail-Safe.)
The Monuments Men is Clooney's tribute to a special group of people who marched alongside the Allied armies as they pushed back the Nazis in an effort to save as much art and architecture as they could, rescuing lost, damaged and stolen works from museums and private collectors. Clooney's narrative style is very much old-fashioned too, with hardly a trace of irony (despite the presence of Bill Murray and Bob Balaban). It gives us a clear sense of purpose, and tackles at least partly the theme of redemption; the one British officer working with the team has disgraced himself due to alcoholism, but in his efforts to prevent the movement of Michelangelo's Madonna and Child statue by the Nazis back to Germany, he is killed and thus properly martyred. The melodramatic question is asked at the end: was it worth it, to lose the lives of two members of his team to rescue thousands of works of art, the Clooney character answers, yeah: but in a sappy twist, the final "yeah" is delivered not by George, but by his dad Nick, the former AMC host (who no doubt gave George his sense of film history). The film has its amusing moments, pulls at the sentiment strings without quite snapping them off, and remains reasonably sincere.
Of course, it also does what a lot of Hollywood films about American history do: glamorize and simplify.
The historical truth is that there were a few hundred individuals working on the allied effort to preserve the art. And the effort was begun by the British, not the Americans, as Clooney's film seems to claim. (As Supreme Allied Commander, it was Eisenhower who did sign off on the orders establishing the central group.) Clooney's film makes it seem like it was an American-created entity, and the American-ness of the narrative is clearly demonstrated in that the only two of the Monuments Men to die are both foreigners. Interestingly enough, this American-ism is what Ben Affleck did in making Argo, the film about the rescue of American diplomats after the Iranian revolution: the effort appears almost entirely the making of the CIA, when it was really the Canadian ambassador and his people who made the great escape possible. (Why did Affleck's film take home Best Picture and Clooney's end up with about a 30 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating? I'm betting it was mostly that the film kept an ironic stance, and because Alan Arkin is fucking funny as the producer.)
But as I said, Clooney has to put some personal faces to this mission, since this is drama after all. In getting us attached to the individual members of the team, we don't worry too much about the historical reality. That said, there's one scene that kind of creeps me out.
Cate Blanchett plays Claire Simone, a French museum curator who has quietly worked for the Resistance in Paris even as she supervises the movement of works of art out of Paris and into Germany (mainly to the private homes of the major Nazi figures, Hitler and Geobbels). We will find later that she has kept a thorough catalog of pretty much every work of art the Nazis have moved, though at first she is reticent to help one of the American Monuments Men, played by Matt Damon, because she believes he represents American museum interests and hopes to take as much stuff back as he can take. We see her at a cafe reading the news that the Nazi officer who was in charge of moving all the art (who at one point threatened her life) has been caught and will likely be killed for his crimes. (The capture is an amusing scene featuring Murray and Balaban.) At that point, she smiles, and notices Damon's character crossing the street. They talk, and she wishes to celebrate; she invites him to her apartment, knowing that he's married and has young children. "Paris is full of 'good husbands,' " she seductively observes.) Eventually, she gives him her catalog, because she trusts him to do the right thing (which, aw shucks, he does), and he also does the right thing by not spending the night with her, though she does directly offer.
It sure as hell seems to me that Blanchett's character is aroused at the news of the Nazi officer's arrest. Or maybe it's just coincidence that, at the moment she reads the newspaper, she sees Damon's character, dressed in Class A uniform, and realizes: holy shit, that's Matt Damon and he's so hot! It's this and other odd moments in the script that show the flaws of this well-intended tribute to people who probably deserve better than this film gives them. It's the kind of film that should be just a launch point for people who want to learn more about this. Except that Clooney is more than capable of making a movie for grown-ups, too, and I wish he had done that here.
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