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
