A sleuthing mission that lacks drama

WHEN the future of Western civilisation is at stake, only the best will do. That's why George Clooney, armed with a compelling World War Two tale about looted art by the Nazis and the art experts tasked with tracking it down, recruited a team of Hollywood A-listers to make The Monuments Men. When George Clooney talks, studio bosses listen.

The film, directed by Clooney and based on a non-fiction book by Robert M Edsel titled The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, tells the little-known story of a unit of dedicated art professionals who worked to recover, protect and return the art to its rightful owners.

Considering the Nazis spirited away an estimated five million items of plundered art during their occupation of Western Europe, the job was a monumental recovery mission. Under direct orders from the German High Command, priceless artworks from churches, cultural institutions and private homes had been removed and stashed away in various locations - the Fuhrer apparently had big plans to build an eponymous museum complex to display works by Rembrandt, Vermeer and Michelangelo, among many others. When the tide of war turns against him, Hitler issues a directive to destroy all the art.

"The very foundation of modern society is at stake," intones Frank Stokes (Clooney), the art historian who outlines the gravity of the situation to his superiors and then proceeds to round up a kind of art world Dirty Dozen to help retrieve the stolen works. They go through basic training, wear military uniforms and have to fire their weapons on occasion, but they are not soldiers by any stretch of the imagination.

In real life, this special Allied unit, named the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section, comprised about 345 men and women from 13 nations, but the film distils them into a few distinct personalities.

With Stokes acting as a narrator of sorts the story is told in episodic form, with each person or two-man team on the trail of specific artworks, primarily a Van Eyck altarpiece from the Ghent Cathedral and a Michelangelo statue from a church in Bruges.

Stokes' all-star team includes James Granger (Matt Damon), a conservator who encounters Claire Simone (Cate Blanchett), a Paris-based museum employee who ostensibly collaborates with the Nazis but secretly works for the Resistance, keeping meticulous records of the artworks that pass through her office.

Other integral members of the group are architect Richard Campbell (Bill Murray) and fellow collector Preston Savitz (Bob Balaban), sculptor Walter Garfield (John Goodman), Donald Jeffries (Hugh Bonneville), a British curator given a second chance after an unspecified fall from grace, and Jean Claude Clermont (Jean Dujardin) as the obligatory Frenchman. Sam Epstein (Dimitri Leonidas) is a young soldier who joins the group as a German-language interpreter.

The Monuments Men is a sleuthing mission filmed in the straightforward old-school style of war films like The Guns of Navarone (1961), but while entertaining in parts, it is not entirely convincing and strangely lacking in drama. There are moments of tension as the men race to recover the art ahead of the Russians, and not everyone makes it back alive but - perhaps because Clooney intended it as such - the film has the feel of a lightweight, resembling an Ocean's Eleven caper more than a serious war movie. Still, Clooney's considerable clout got The Monuments Men made - and for that art historians everywhere should be grateful.

Rating: B-