The Wandering Review: ‘The Monuments Men’

By Laurie Baron

SAN DIEGO — Like its director George Clooney, The Monuments Men is debonair and handsome, but there’s always a nagging suspicion beneath the surface that it could be more intellectually substantial.  Commemorating the Allied team that recovered paintings and sculptures seized by the Nazis provides a different perspective on World War II from traditional combat movies.  Based on Robert Edsel’s book of the same title, The Monuments Men chronicles the operation mounted in the last year of the war by a detachment of art historians, artists, and museum curators to track down the masterpieces Germany pilfered from countries it conquered and return them to their original owners.

Clooney plays the suave leader of the mission, Frank Stokes, whose real name was George Stout.  As the head of the conservation department at Harvard’s Fogg Museum, Stout lobbied for the creation of a special unit tasked with saving artwork from destruction by the Germans if they lost the war or expropriation if it fell into the hands of Soviet troops.  While seriously dedicated to recapturing the invaluable pieces Germany had confiscated, Clooney’s Stokes comes off more like the charming and witty Danny Ocean from Ocean’s Eleven or Matt Kowalski from Gravity.

The lighter tone that Clooney injects into the film creeps into much of the acting and dialogue of the other characters who were more thoughtful in real life than their movie counterparts: Bob Balaban as Preston Savitz who is based on Lincoln Kerstein, a co-founder the School of American Ballet and the New York City Ballet; Hugh Bonneville as Donald Jeffries who is based on Ronald Balfour, a Cambridge educated medieval historian; Cate Blanchett as Claire Simone who is based on Rose Valland, an art historian and member of the French Resistance; Matt Damon as James Granger who is based on James Rorimer, the curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Cloisters; John Goodman as Walter Garfield who is based on the sculptor Walter Hancock; Dimitri Leonidas as Sam Epstein who is based Harry Ettlinger, a German Jew who fled to the United States and returned to Germany as an American soldier; and Bill Murray as Richard Campbell who is based on Robert Posey, an antifascist activist and architect;  Only Jean Dujardin plays a fictitious character, the daring Jean Claude Clermont of the French Resistance.

With the exception of Epstein, Clooney does not reveal much about the fascinating backgrounds of these characters and their motivations.  For example, there is a moving scene about Granger (Rorimer) finding the address of an owner of one of the paintings and bringing it to the abandoned apartment where it once hung.  Putting it back on a hook, he notices that the walls are scrawled with anti-Semitic graffiti.   I don’t know if this episode actually happened, but it would be more poignant if the audience knew that Rorimer was Jewish.  Similarly, the Jewish lineage of Savitz (Kerstein) is never mentioned, though Balaban’s movie persona is usually as a Jew.

Nonetheless, the movie discreetly discloses that the Jews of Europe are slated for slaughter while the protagonists comb the Western front for the treasures stolen by the Nazis.  Ettlinger tells his story of growing up in Nazi Germany and immigrating to the United States.  Simone accompanies Granger to a warehouse full of artworks, furniture, and other possessions.  When he naively asks what all these things are; she replies, “People’s lives.”  Stokes interrogates an SS Officer and charges him with running a death camp.  As Stokes’s minions discover the trove of items purloined by the Germans in salt and copper mines, they also stumble upon gold bars and fillings extracted from the teeth of murdered Jews.  Just before the credits role, we learn that more than a thousand Torah scrolls were retrieved by the monuments men.  In a story that appeared when the movie was released, YIVO reported that its archives and library were recovered by the monuments men.

Since two of the monuments men were killed during the mission, the film raises the question of whether it was worth the sacrifice of their lives to preserve the cultural legacy of Europe.  The film makes it abundantly clear that it was, but doesn’t talk about the controversy that swirled around the establishment of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section in late 1943.  At the same time, Roosevelt resisted political pressure to launch rescue missions for the Jews who had managed to survive the Nazi onslaught.  The US Army rejected the idea because it would be a diversion of resources.  FDR belatedly ordered the creation of the War Refugee Board in January of 1944, but the agency was hamstrung by its dependence on private funding and deference to American immigration laws.

Despite these shortcomings, The Monuments Men is entertaining and informative.  The acting is engaging even though the script does not delve deeply into each character.  At the end I was disappointed that Clooney did not append an epilogue about what became of these figures.  All in all, it is an above average film which achieves the epic stature that its beautiful cinematography, idealistic dialogue, intrusive musical score, and interesting plot suggest.

*

Baron is a professor emeritus of history at San Diego State University.  He may be contacted at lawrence.baron@sdjewishworld.com