Old Yorker

  • The Monuments Men

    Old YorkerFilm review

    George Clooney (2014)

    Sally and I went to a subtitled-for-the-hard-of-hearing show.  This was primarily because it was the only show all week that we could manage but it didn’t seem a bad idea anyway:  we’ve both been finding so much inaudible recently.  The irony is that The Monuments Men can’t be faulted on this score:  the actors speak clearly but you’d be better off not hearing most of George Clooney’s and Grant Heslov’s dialogue.   It was hard not to laugh at the literal conscientiousness of the subtitles – ‘metal clanking’, ‘inaudible muttering’ – although these didn’t include ‘crap jaunty music by Alexandre Desplat’, perhaps because it’s nearly continuous, except in the occasional solemn moments.  It was obvious that something had gone badly wrong with this picture:  the Oscar buzz of early 2013 vanished in the course of the year and The Monuments Men eventually opened in the US in the dead zone of early February.  The film, loosely based on real-life events (which were also the basis of John Frankenheimer’s The Train (1964)), tells the story of how a small group of American museum directors, curators and art historians formed an army unit in Europe in the closing months of World War II, with a mission to find and save numerous works of art from Nazi destruction.  The Monuments Men is so bad that it’s impossible to discern what George Clooney intended but you know it’s going to be bad from the word go, when Frank Stokes (Clooney) delivers his pitch about the proposed mission to Franklin D Roosevelt.  (Stokes debriefs Harry Truman in a matching creaky postscript.)  The movie never settles into any kind of coherent tone:  it veers between Ocean’s bro-mancing and attacks of noble sentimentality – many of the exchanges are so corny that Clooney might be spoofing antique wartime dramas.   Desplat’s annoying score is nothing if not consistent; Clooney’s overuse of it may be an admission that the same can’t be said for anything else in the film.

    This material does provide a challenge to a commercial film-maker, one that’s reflected in Frank Stokes’s reminder to his colleagues that a work of art can never be more important than a man’s life.  Few people in the audience, philistine or otherwise, are likely to react to the recovery of a priceless painting as they would react to, say, the salvation of refugee children.  This challenge is also what makes The Monuments Men potentially distinctive but realising that potential depends on rich characterisation of Stokes and his team; the viewer needs to understand their passion for the cultural artefacts they’re looking to rescue.  Instead, the movie is full of jingoistic nonsense of what you’d hoped was a bygone era.  There are some laughable examples of this:  the non-Americans in the team (Hugh Bonneville and Jean Dujardin) are the ones who are killed off; the rapid switch, in May 1945, from German to Soviet soldiers being the baddies is unintentionally revealing.   Other instances can’t be dismissed so easily:  particularly offensive is Clooney’s cross-cutting between a grievously wounded soldier on an operating table and Bill Murray and Bob Balaban (two more of the monuments men) listening to ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’, played over forces radio and bringing homesick tears to their eyes.   Stokes’s colleagues also include Matt Damon and John Goodman.   Just as Julia Roberts was allowed to join in the boys’ fun in Ocean’s Eleven and Ocean’s Twelve (though not Ocean’s Thirteen), so Cate Blanchett is the only woman with any kind of role in The Monuments Men.  She’s Claire Simon, a museum curator in occupied France, frumpish and spiky at first but warming up when James Granger (Damon) comes for dinner.  When he says to Claire he’s never seen her smile before and wonders what’s caused it, she answers:  ‘After all, this is Paris – and it is springtime’.  Cate Blanchett is ridiculous in this role in the way that only a major actor applying their skills to swill can be.  Her lines are by no means the worst, though.   When Stokes says (of Hitler) to Granger, ‘He wanted it all’, Granger replies, as if he’s saying something very different, ‘He wanted everything’.   At the mention of Ghent, another member of the arty half-dozen (or so) asks, ‘What was in Ghent?’  When he’s told that the Ghent altarpiece was in Ghent, he exclaims, ‘You mean they’ve stolen the Ghent altarpiece?!’

    It’s a cause for relief that George Clooney has no talent for delivering the pompous tripe about art and culture that he and Grant Heslov have written for Frank Stokes to speak.  Thanks to his core of humour, Clooney sounds as if he’s struggling to take the lines seriously.   But The Monuments Men is his fifth feature as director and there’s less and less reason to think he’s going to amount to the film-maker some of his admirers expected on the basis of his first two efforts.  This latest – in which nearly every scene is blah and arrhythmic and there’s nothing even to suggest the picture has lost shape as a result of anxious work in the cutting room – is so much worse than the others that, for the time being, it can be dismissed as an aberration.  But Clooney’s filmography as a director is looking increasingly egocentric:  he’s appeared in all five of his movies to date, has had a leading role in most of them and goes one stage further at the end of The Monuments Men.  When President Truman congratulates Frank Stokes on what he and his team have achieved, he nevertheless asks Stokes, ‘Do you think anyone will remember this in thirty years’ time?’   Clooney duly flashes forward thirty years:  we see a well-preserved elderly man and a small boy, presumably his grandson, admiring the Madonna of Bruges, one of the treasures recovered by Stokes’s men.   The old chap is played by Clooney’s non-actor father, Nick.

    25 February 2014

  • Moonrise Kingdom

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Wes Anderson (2012)

    Wes Anderson should make animated films more often.  Fantastic Mr Fox was an unexpectedly rich pleasure but the ingeniously detailed Moonrise Kingdom is not the first of his live-action movies to be unsatisfying in its elaborate superficiality.  Set in 1965, it centres on the absconding-cum-elopement of two children, from their very different homes in New England.  Sam Shakusky is an orphan:  his current foster father has had enough of him and Sam is friendless in the scout troop whose camp he disappears from.   Suzy Bishop is the only girl among the four children of her miserably married lawyer parents (her three brothers are a chorus of clones).   Moonrise Kingdom seems to be about escaping from childhood isolation while at the same time postponing the adulthood in which the grown-ups around Sam and Suzy are unhappy.  (I don’t know the explanation of the film’s title but it brought to mind ‘the moon that is always rising’ from the last stanza of ‘Fern Hill’.)   The appearance of the Bishop family home, not unlike that of their screen predecessors the Tenenbaums, is arrestingly peculiar.  In the film’s overture and conclusion, the camera moves from room to room of this doll’s house; in each room, there’s a person or group of people in designedly eccentric attitudes or occupations.  Music is an important element of Moonrise Kingdom, principally Benjamin Britten although there’s other classical music and a burst of yé-yé (Françoise Hardy) at one point.  Pleasing though the Britten is, it’s typical of Anderson that the playing of ‘The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra’ is nearly overshadowed by the sarcastic effect of the commentary on the recording, which explains the piece.  I wish we’d left the cinema before this is echoed, during the closing credits, by the voice of Jared Gilman, who plays Sam, analysing the component parts of Alexandre Desplat’s original music for the film.

    There’s the odd bit in Moonrise Kingdom that’s appealing because it’s something you recognise or at least rings true – like the children in animal costumes queuing up to take their places in the ark for a school production of ‘Noye’s Fludde’.  (The onstage flood waves are fun too, even if this is quite a set for a junior school in the mid-1960s.)  Most of the time, however, Anderson’s rococo archness is very limiting.  The actors voicing the puppet animals in Fantastic Mr Fox expressed a vitality and comic urgency that’s missing here.  The film is weightless without being light-hearted and the physically spectacular bits (there’s an all-stops-out storm at its climax to complement the biblical flood) amount to little because there’s little at stake.  I struggle to write much about Moonrise Kingdom at all.  When I saw the trailer I was worried for the cat that appeared in it, because of what happens to dogs in Anderson movies.  In the event, the focus is, after all, on a terrier, which doesn’t feature in the trailer and which goes the way of all Anderson canines.  The moment is more immediately physically upsetting than usual but at least the terrible image is over with pretty early.  I think this is about as much depth as Moonrise Kingdom achieves.

    In his highly enthusiastic review of the film in the New Yorker, Anthony Lane refers to ‘Andersonland, where deadpan is the default’.  This is what I find irritating about the territory – I’m all for comic underplaying but the effect here is monotonous.  It’s a pleasant surprise that Bruce Willis, as the police captain leading the hunt for the missing children, is gentle and touchingly amusing.  Frances McDormand, as Mrs Bishop, transmutes her native eagerness as a performer effectively but Bill Murray, as her husband, has a dry melancholy that’s too familiar.  The caricatural brio of Tilda Swinton, as a character known only as Social Services, is bracing in this company.  She’s been given an oddly eyecatching hairdo and the hat on her uniform looks like a Salvation Army bonnet but the only time I nearly laughed was when she marched into a room to upbraid Willis and Edward Norton, as the hapless scoutmaster.   Norton is good but he deserves more opportunity to show depth – he’s touching when, stripped of his badge of office, he flinches with acute shame.  Anderson, though, seems more interested in poking mild, predictable fun at the character (when Sam disappears, the scoutmaster exclaims, ‘Jiminy cricket – he flew the coop!’).   As Norton’s bellicose senior in the scouting hierarchy, Harvey Keitel is too aware of himself as a well-known actor, who’s not well known for comedy, being comical.   Jason Schwartzman is a contrasting cool scout and Bob Balaban provides a droll on-screen narration.   The two kids are certainly singular although I found it hard to make out a lot of what they were saying – not a matter of volume but their untrained voices are fuzzy.  As Suzy, Kara Hayward’s strangeness seems more absorbed than Jared Gilman’s.  As with so much in this tiresomely witty movie, the latter’s oddball quality is largely a matter of visual design.

    27 May 2012

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