Review of The Monuments Men (2014) by Jdkoerner — 08 Feb 2014

I thought this was very well executed World War II genre adventure, and up to the standards of The Great Escape, Guns of Navarone, and The Dirty Dozen, all-star entertainments that don't pretend to convey any great moral lesson [other than Nazis are Evil and yay we beat them] a notable exception being Bridge on the River Kwai, which was about the high price honor can exact. I found what I thought were deliberate tips of the hat by Clooney: the main title is in a 60s modern design, the music is that jaunty war-movie type like the kind that predominates in Dozen, and one of the team, the Brit, is played by Hugh Bonneville, who bares an uncanny resemblance to Jack Hawkins in Kwai.

No reviewer I have read has cited what I consider to be one of the movie's greatest strengths: its concision, and I don't just mean its 118 min running time in an age when movies now seem to start at 140 minutes and go up from there. I wasn't using a stop watch, but afterward I had the strong sense that no single sequence ran longer than six minutes, no speech longer than 3. It would very easy to drag out scenes on the grounds of suspense: one early dramatic moment plays like the opening of Inglourious Basterds in reverse: will the retired Nazi be caught in his own cottage? Director/writer Clooney could have shown the serving of an entire meal, while our Nazi continues to sweat; instead, the question is answered in less than 3 minutes [and note the sly references to Basterds in which a Monuments Man asks if the Nazi's wife speaks English].

I always make the same point about genre pictures: of course they are predictable, of course they have to hit a certain number of beats. The question is, how will they do so? To say that Clooney did so "tastefully" is to damn with faint praise; the French despised the Nazi's? Show two women spitting into a a Nazi officer's champagne glass. The art is in danger of being burned? 30 seconds of the biggest blowtorches on film. I will leave out the references to Jews: their very "tastefulness" means they draw you in before you have a chance to marshal your defenses and nowhere to which you can recoil afterward.

Just as there are a million ways to play The Wrong Man accused [from Hitchcock to 12 Angry Men, or, in reverse, The Verdict] or every single romantic comedy [would you really complain that you were two steps ahead of the screenwriters when you figured out the unlikely couple would get together in the end? ] this picture is as notable for both its genre strengths as to the its plainspoken, no nonsense approach to what is still, and one can only hope pray, remains the single darkest chapter of human history.