Saving the art

Film review: The Monuments Men (12a)
Running time 110 minutes
Rating:***
War throws up the most unlikely heroes, sometimes just at the moment you need them most. There are plenty of examples, such as the sailors of Dunkirk’s little ships; the women pilots who flew unarmed planes to their bases and, of course, the Monuments Men. It is often the case with unlikely heroes that very few people get to know of their achievements until long after they have vanished back into their own, quiet lives. Such is the case with the Monuments Men, until actor and director George Clooney became fascinated by their story, one which was a curious mixture of brazen theft, bravery, art history, and a desire to help heal the distress ably described in the German word – Weltschmerz ,or overwhelming, global pain. The story begins in 1943, when museum director Frank Stokes (Clooney) persuades the ailing US President Roosevelt to create a squad of men to prevent the Nazis looting all the great art they can find, either for personal gain, to donate to the horrifyingly proposed Führer Museum, or to destroy as a way of wiping out a people by destroying their achievements. On the team, who in contrast to ‘The Dirty Dozen’ are best described as ‘The Civilised Seven’, are museum directors, exhibition curators, or art historians, all profoundly unsuited for army life. Actors such as John Goodman, Bill Murray, Hugh Bonneville, Matt Damon and Clooney himself, play members of the squad who not only have to deal with the rampantly acquisitive Nazis, but the US Army that sometimes needed persuading not to blow up a particular church, or chapel, with an irreplaceable 15th-century Giotto fresco inside. Cate Blanchett is Claire Simone, the French assistant to Nazi looter in Paris, Viktor Stahl. Eventually her covert record-keeping of all the treasures that pass through her office into Nazi hands, provides the important clue as to where the Nazis have hidden their loot – paradoxically in the same kind of place that the British hid its great art treasures. The Monuments Men is a tale of loss as well as recovery, and in a sense the film is not a celebration of victory over the kind of brutal ignorance that could set a flamethrower to a Picasso, but an acknowledgement that there were still people alive and not so subsumed by war that they could not try to save so much of the art – the paintings and sculpture – that defines who we are. The Monuments Men may not be the most entertaining film about the subject. The narrative is disjointed and, at times, somewhat dull – and the movie has been panned by some American critics as a result. Certainly, it could have benefitted from a little Hollywood flair and at times seemed overwhelmed by the so-solemn nature of the subject matter, but it was still worth making, if only in tribute to the men and women who helped save the art for nations today. You could almost imagine a better programme being made by Channel Four or BBC 2 telling the story in documentary form, including interviews with some of the passionate, brave and dedicated people who comprised the Monuments Men.