The Monuments Men

George Clooney’s The Monuments Men is this year’s version of Ben Affleck’s Argo. A historic event is twisted into a celebration of American nobility and effectiveness. At a time when the US seems powerless in international diplomacy and warfare these films have an obvious appeal. In the long run, however, I wonder if Americans would be better served with accurate history instead of rosy myth making. At least theoretically, in a democracy an informed population should be able to make better decisions than a deluded one.

The script, music and structure seem pulled out of WW II films, despite the one original element — the Un-Soldierly Seven’s campaign to retrieve Western art classics stolen by the Nazis. The poster calls the yanks’ adventure “the greatest art heist in history.” Nope, that would be the Nazis’ huge theft of which the Americans — with of course merely token help from France, England and Canada’s contribution, Matt Damon’s French — managed to recover only a large portion. 

As Affleck did, Clooney’s script mixes humour, bristling character relations, and dollops of sentimentality, as if a spoonful of sugar is needed to make a fake history lesson go down. Like Affleck’s invented airport chase, here the yanks blow open a mine and retrieve and load 3,000 works of art, including a large Michelangelo marble and the Altar of Ghent, in the few hours before the Russkys take over.  

In one respect Clooney does America some service with this film. He represents the nation as committed to culture. At least his heroes here have that commitment, if the country at large — e.g., the Republican Right — does not. Perhaps these heroes’ valour might convert those in the audience who have the power to arrest the nation-wide underfunding of art museums, the closings of orchestras and the abandonment of arts education. Matt Damon declines Cate Blanchette so as not to offend the Tea Party folk. Besides, culture is no guarantee of humanity. Nazi leaders loved their Goethe and Beethoven. 

The Brit’s death trying to save the Michelangelo Madonna explicitly raises the question: Is even such a great work of art worth a person’s life? As that character managed to overcome a career shame and die with new dignity, he might think it was. No-one else has the right to answer for him. 

But that question opens up another issue, which the film carefully frames out. Clooney valorizes the Americans for sending out a brigade to save art. To preserve their purity he whitewashes out instances of America's thievery and impropriety. Worse, the film excludes the American government’s refusal to save the Jews from Nazi annihilation, denying not just refugees but even the urging to bomb out the railroad lines to Auschwitz. So the Clooney character has no claim to the moral high ground when he says: “The Germans took better care of the paintings than they did people.” On this the American record is no better.

The “Jewish issue” is mentioned. There’s the army driver Epstein, a German refugee from Newark; the shot of the warehouse of Jewish dispossessions, including gold teeth; the Cezanne theft from the Rothchild collection; and the Clooney character’s facile rejection of the German officer’s antisemitism. But applauding America’s rescue of the art without acknowledging its abandonment of the Jews undercuts this film’s moral authority. 
     Of course, that would be another movie. Would a culture committed to feel-good commercialism ever make it?