George Clooney is a fine actor and a great movie star, but the qualities
that makes him such an appealing screen presence – his instantly engaging
charisma, his light comic touch, his facility for gravitas – seem to instantly
desert him as soon as he steps behind the camera. The films he has made since
his energetic and creative debut Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (which now
looks like the work of a completely different director) have been handsomely
mounted, nostalgic and tasteful pictures that deal with notions of honour and
decency. They have also been rather dull.
The shame about all of this is that Clooney has an eye for a great
story, he just doesn’t have the capacity to realise it. He seemed like the
perfect man to make a 1930s screwball comedy throwback, but his leaden
directorial hand killed whatever sense of charm, humour or fun it might have
possessed, and The Monuments Men suffers a similar fate. There’s plenty of
promise in this story of US soldiers being sent into war-torn Europe to
save the great works of art being systematically destroyed or stolen by Hitler.
Clooney sets the film up as an Ocean’s-style caper, opening with a jaunty
getting-the-gang-together montage sequence and introducing us to an ensemble
that appears to promise a good time.
Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, John Goodman, Jean
Dujardin and Hugh Bonneville star as the soldiers enlisted for duty, with
Dimitri Leonidas bringing the average age down and Cate Blanchett adding a
negligible female presence. The stars are paired off for separate narratives
that run parallel throughout the picture, but everything they do is so oddly
muted and flat. Damon and Blanchett make some half-hearted gestures towards
romance before eventually walking away, while Bill Murray and Bob Balaban are
set up as a bickering double-act but their one-liners are delivered with such
little spark or conviction, it’s as if we’re watching them in an early
rehearsal, reading from the page.
Perhaps Clooney was operating under the impression that the sense of
camaraderie a film like this is propelled by would instantly form through some
kind of movie star alchemy. He makes no effort to develop these characters and
their prior relationships with one another through the writing; we are told that
they are all tangentially connected to the world of art – curators, restorers,
etc. – but they seem to have little interest in or perspective on the art
they’re looking for. Clooney barely gives us any opportunity to see it for
ourselves either, beyond a couple of listless close-ups and a few brief shots
of the characters standing in mute awe in front of either intact or destroyed
artworks. The only way the art itself really factors into the film is through
the central theme of whether saving such art is worth risking a man’s life, a
question that Clooney only asks via laborious lumps of voiceover, never really
engaging with it in any but the most facile way.
In fact, facile is the best word to describe The Monuments Men, and to
describe Clooney’s directorial work in general. It strikes a serious pose but
makes no attempt to engage with the complexity or tragedy of its subject;
Clooney is happy to let the movie coast along on the surface of things, and to
let his actors do the same. This might not have been an issue if the film was
engaging and entertaining on any level, but The Monuments Men is lumpy and
staid, with Clooney proving unable to infuse any of the key moments with a sense
of tension or excitement. In particular, two scenes in which Goodman and
Dujardin find themselves in a pickle are directed in the most frustratingly
ham-handed fashion, and a later comic set-piece in which one of the team stands
on a landmine has all of its potential for danger and humour leeched out of it
by the careless staging and editing that suggests Clooney just wants to get it
out of the way. What drew him to this project? It’s a cracking story, for sure,
but we get no sense of passion or urgency from watching the film itself. For a
film about the value of art, The Monuments Men is bafflingly artless.