That George Clooney's latest directorial effort could result in a film as creaky and clumsy as Monuments Men is dispiriting. In part this is because Clooney the filmmaker is capable of much more. His first two features, the demented Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and the evocative Good Night and Good Luck, were worthy films that still demand attention. The disappointment that the new film prompts also owes something to its subject: the World War II-era Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program. An Allied group responsible for protecting cultural artifacts from harm and plunder, the MFAA was featured in Robert M. Edsel's nonfiction book, also titled Monuments Men. The story is a fascinating one, and it deserves better than the fictionalized mishmash of adventure, comedy, and melodrama that Clooney and co-scripter Grant Heslov create from it.
Monuments Men wants to harken back to the WWII action features of old, while also being a fizzy heist picture in the mold of Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's films. From headlining that series, Clooney perhaps gleaned the sub-genre’s beats, but Monuments Men evinces a filmmaker who has little understanding for how to assemble them into a functioning whole. The film is distractingly arrhythmic, narratively speaking, as though it were haphazardly assembled from the fragments of a longer feature (or perhaps several). Moreover, Clooney and his performers find it challenging to maintain a light-hearted, snappy tone while also earnestly conveying the righteousness of their characters' mission. Ultimately, the film does neither.
The should-be-fantastic cast—Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban—is left high and dry, making weak gestures in the general direction of comedy and pathos. The film might have been forgettable if a few isolated moments didn't betray Clooney's dormant dramatic chops: a scene where Murray and Balaban ferret out an art-hoarding SS officer, for example, or a melancholy almost-seduction between Damon and Blanchett. Consequently, the viewer is left with not merely a disposable February blip, but a wasteful letdown.
