A story too little known, the work of a group of some 300 men
and women on a most unusual military mission in World War II provides the basis
for George Clooney’s latest movie, “The Monuments Men.” The unit, a decidedly
unmilitary bunch of museum curators, artists, art historians, and architects,
worked in Europe, landing shortly after the Normandy invasion, seeking to
locate and recover hundreds of thousands of works of art that the Germans,
under the direction of Hitler and Goering, systematically looted from the
countries they conquered and occupied.
The movie reduces the endeavor to the work of seven men from various
relevant disciplines, under the command of a scholar, Frank Stokes (George
Cooney), the man who persuades President Roosevelt of the necessity of their
task. He and his men believe they must rescue Western culture from Hitler, who
dreams of stocking his own grand museum with the harvest of centuries of
genius. Their difficult and sometimes dangerous task not only demands a hunt
for the treasures of the past, but also a desperate race to stop the retreating
German army from destroying the works stored in caves and mines. They must also
prevent the Soviet army’s own unit, the Trophy Brigade, from taking the loot
back to Russia.
The picture shows, sometimes comically, Stokes’s
recruitment of a handful of middle-aged men into his unit, their outfitting and
basic training as soldiers of a sort, so they can go to war for the salvation
of Western culture. An English and a French officer join
the Americans, making their task, like the war itself, a joint effort of the
Allies. To locate some of the works, one member of the unit, James Granger
(Matt Damon), enlists the help of a brave, clever Frenchwoman, Claire Simone
(Cate Blanchett), who worked as a secretary to a
German officer and observed Hermann Goering’s acquisition of numerous
paintings; her ledger of the paintings and their destination allows the
Americans to retrieve untold numbers of masterpieces.
The picture’s several different stories of the separate Monuments
Men sometimes tend to diffuse the picture’s narrative focus and weaken its
coherence. The great unifying element of the story, however, involves two
famous masterpieces, both from Belgian churches, the Ghent Altarpiece and the magnificent
Bruges Madonna, the only Michelangelo sculpture to leave Italy. Though probably
somewhat fictionalized, the unit’s discovery of those two great works generates
suspense that turns into real emotion, a genuinely moving moment in the film.
Clooney’s direction generously allows all the actors to
shine, sometimes humorously, sometimes quite seriously. Playing a character who
must be the fattest sergeant in the U. S. Army, John Goodman exemplifies one of
his great strengths, mixing somber reactions with a kind of offhand comedy. As
the oldest member of the team, Bill Murray displays some of the sadness and
loss of all wars when he hears the voices of his daughter and grandchildren on
a record, wishing him a Merry Christmas during the Battle of the Bulge.
Unusually, “The Monuments Men” really deserves most of the
favorable press that surrounds its release. It tells an important story, it employs
a fine cast, and it creates genuine emotion out of so unusual a subject as the
search for art. Like a great many of those familiar World War II documentaries,
it also provides an astonishing amount of facts about the Nazi theft of a huge,
extraordinary artistic treasure hoard, from great paintings and sculptures to
rare books and even thousands of church bells.
The picture instructs its audiences in the dedication of a
group of men and women who believed in the importance of their mission and in
the role of art in creating and sustaining civilization. It may even remind
some people of a time when our government actually cared about the work of the
Monuments Men, in contrast to the cavalier dismissals of the looting of museums
during the Iraq invasion. When the president asks Frank Stokes if the rescue of
a great painting or sculpture was worth the life of the person trying to save
it, knowing the man and understanding the loss, Stokes defends the sacrifice.
After all, as Horace wrote, art is long, life is short.
This article appears in Feb 5-11, 2014.
