The Monuments Men (12A.)
Directed by George Clooney.
Starring George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Cate Blanchett, Bob Balaban, Hugh Bonneville, and Jean Dujardin. 118 mins.
While Brad Pitt got to lead up the Inglorious Basterds, George Clooney gets to command a Terrible Decent Half Dozen or so, in his latest ensemble piece. The Monuments Men are a group of cultured types (art historians, architects, curators) who spent the last year of the war trying to retrieve art masterpieces seized by the Nazis. Basically they are doing what Indiana Jones was doing in Raiders before the War, but much more gently.
With that story and such a cast how can it fail? Maybe because the makers assumed that with that story and that cast they couldn’t go wrong. The film seems content to coast along on its stars’ screen presence, with minimal characterisation and everyone instructed to just do-what-they-do, but in a uniform.
It is a great and noble true story but Clooney and his regular co-writer Grant Heslov haven’t found a way to make it into a great and noble screen story. It appears to be scrupulously faithful to the events, but so much so that it lumbers itself with an episodic and ambling narrative that fails to engage. Conversely every time they try to invent a bit business to try and get a few laughs or zip the story along it is always seems incredibly contrived. While their achievements were immense in terms of Civilisation, on screen it just doesn’t seem that much.
The film keeps searching around looking in any nook and cranny for something of value but finds only duds and fakes and quickly moves on to try somewhere else, while all the time the real action is taking place somewhere off screen.
Directed by George Clooney.
Starring George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Cate Blanchett, Bob Balaban, Hugh Bonneville, and Jean Dujardin. 118 mins.
While Brad Pitt got to lead up the Inglorious Basterds, George Clooney gets to command a Terrible Decent Half Dozen or so, in his latest ensemble piece. The Monuments Men are a group of cultured types (art historians, architects, curators) who spent the last year of the war trying to retrieve art masterpieces seized by the Nazis. Basically they are doing what Indiana Jones was doing in Raiders before the War, but much more gently.
With that story and such a cast how can it fail? Maybe because the makers assumed that with that story and that cast they couldn’t go wrong. The film seems content to coast along on its stars’ screen presence, with minimal characterisation and everyone instructed to just do-what-they-do, but in a uniform.
It is a great and noble true story but Clooney and his regular co-writer Grant Heslov haven’t found a way to make it into a great and noble screen story. It appears to be scrupulously faithful to the events, but so much so that it lumbers itself with an episodic and ambling narrative that fails to engage. Conversely every time they try to invent a bit business to try and get a few laughs or zip the story along it is always seems incredibly contrived. While their achievements were immense in terms of Civilisation, on screen it just doesn’t seem that much.
The film keeps searching around looking in any nook and cranny for something of value but finds only duds and fakes and quickly moves on to try somewhere else, while all the time the real action is taking place somewhere off screen.
