Clooney: The Monuments Men (2014)

Based on the bestselling book by Robert M. Edsel, The Monuments Men follows a special WWII Allied Army unit headed by Frank Stokes (George Clooney) charged with recovering artworks damaged or in danger from Axis and Allied forces, as well as artworks that had been appropriated or were in danger of being appropriated for Hitler’s projected Fuhrer Museum. Drawn from virtually every artistic and architectural field, the unit plays, for the most part, as a kind of embodiment of mid-century American modernism, which prevents them ever feeling too sanctimoniously indebted to the buildings, monuments and artworks they’re preserving and recovering, to the point where it quickly comes to feel as if the treasures of Europe are best housed in American institutions, or at least the mobile, elastic exhibition and curation space that the Monument Men seem to carry with them wherever they go. As a result, the architecture of the group tends to outweigh the individual charisma of its members, a surprisingly effective approach given that it’s populated by such a charismatic group of actors, with Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Bob Balaban and Hugh Bonneville at its core core. At times, it almost feels as if the film is shot entirely within the ambit and ambience of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, not least because Damon’s character is based on James Rorimer, director of the Met and founder of the Cloisters, whose project of appropriating and transporting medieval architecture and artefacts to New York City occurred contemporaneously with his work with the Monument Men, and was surely continuous with the kind of curatorial ethos on display here, which tends to favour medieval and early Renaissance magnificence above all else. Buried all beneath it somewhere, then, is a sublime, heroic confrontation between the Met and the projected Fuhrer Museum, with the Monument Men almost content to be so many monuments adorning the porticos and flanks of the former, as they seek out their treasures amongst ever more sublime and imposing European landscapes. At its most sweeping moments, there’s even a sense that American art institutions have eclipsed the Vatican, since the searches tend to converge on the Ghent Altarpiece, pride of the Catholic Church, which can nevertheless no longer find safe harbour, even in Rome. That might sound like the film is more interested in venues than artworks in themselves, but the very venueless of these masterpieces – especially Michelangelo’s Madonna, which eludes the unit for most of the film – gives them a new magnificence, as well as an odd nostalgia for the rapturous communion that must have been possible with them, with all of Europe, on the eve of their imminent destruction, the last few, hushed, furtive moments before they were reduced to reproductions forever. As a stirring, muscular riposte to everything that made Hitler a bad artist and aesthete, then, it’s quite unmatched, just as it’s hard to think of a cinematic take on Nazism that’s so riddled with Hitler’s artistic impotence, or that ascribes so much of his final failures to his earliest ones