Film review - The Monuments Men

George Clooney directs and stars in this true WW2 drama set in the last three years of World War II. While Hitler was ravaging Europe, a small group of soldiers, historians and academics joined forces to locate, rescue and return to their rightful owners the art treasures and artefacts stolen from museums, churches and private collectors by the Third Reich. This group was the 'Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives' programme, aka 'The Monuments Men'.

Hitler was an unsuccessful artist but nonetheless, he thought of himself as a connoisseur of the arts, so when he came to power in 1933, he enforced his aesthetic ideal on the nation. The types of art that were favoured amongt the Nazi party were classical portraits and landscapes by Old Masters. Hitler also has a fascination with religious art and artefacts. When Germany occupied Europe at the height of its powers, they stole or confiscated 20% of the continent’s art treasures. Some were kept for the Hitler hierarchy or for personal possessions, while others, as the Allies drew closer as the war ended, were buried or destroyed to prevent them being returned to their original owners.

This little know true story, adapted by Clooney from the book by Robert M. Edsel, is a solid adventure story that seldom lags. While the film has not been so well received in the USA, it could be that it’s been marketed as an action film, which it’s patently not. It’s a thoughtful well-paced character piece that recounts an important yet little know period of history

The cast is stellar: Clooney plays an art historian named Frank Stokes, based on renowned Harvard art conservationist George Stout. He gathers six colleagues too old for the trenches and too out of shape for boot camp; one curator of medieval art at the Metropolitan Museum (Matt Damon), one architect (Bill Murray), one sculptor (John Goodman), one French art dealer (Jean Dujardin), one historian (Bob Balaban), one British art expert (Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville) and a young German Jew who acts as a driver and translator (Dimitri Leonidas).

We follow their investigations from Normandy, through France, Belgium, the Battle of the Bulge and ending under the German salt mines where they uncover 16,000 concealed treasures stored for Hitler’s proposed Fuhrer Museum nestled among 100 tons of gold from the fillings in the teeth of captured Jews. The story focuses especially on the recovery of two of the world’s most iconic religious artefacts: Michelangelo’s Madonna of Bruges stolen from the Church of Our Lady in Bruges, and Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece stolen from Saint Bavo Cathedral in Ghent.

The Monuments Men were racing against time to protect the artefacts from both the retreating Nazis and the advancing Russians, while trying to convince the sceptics (including two U.S. presidents) that the work was imperative to remind the world that civilization is defined and remembered by the quality of its art.

A vital piece of the story is the involvement of Claire Simone (an excellent Cate Blanchett), a mousy, bespectacled Resistance fighter based on real-life curator Rose Valland, who worked as a secretary for Hermann Goring when he used the Jeu de Paume Museum in 1943 to store Nazi plunder, risking her life to secretly document the shipment of every work of art transported to Germany by her boss. Ms. Valland’s meticulous records ultimately led to the to the recovery of thousands of masterpieces the Monuments Men would otherwise never have located.

As well as great all round performance by the entire cast, the sets, European cinematography and excellent score are strong points for the movie.

Although staging so many vignettes over such a protracted period of time frames with such a large cast in such a variety of countries, can be confusing, this is still a well-played story - so ignore the reviews and go and see it.

While 5 million artefacts were recovered by the Allies, looted art still turns up in Germany even today thus making this movie still relevant.  Thirty years from now, will anyone remember the accomplishments of those saviours of five-million works of art that enriched the aesthetic history of the world? Thanks to George Clooney, they will now.

The Monuments Men
Genre:  Drama/Historical  
Director:  George Clooney
Rating: M (violence)
Run time: 1 hour 58 mins