Raiders of the lost art

The good news: The Monuments Men is based on a fascinating episode in the history of World War II; it’s agreeably entertaining; and it has a big, attractive cast. The bad news: The film’s version of history feels too much like movie-friendly fiction, and the cast members mostly play versions of themselves, with only the bare minimum of links to the historical figures on whom they are based.

Based on the actual exploits of U.S. Army specialists charged with recovering stolen treasures of European art in the late stages of World War II, the film follows a handful of characters through a mildly suspenseful adventure that is part secret mission, part cultural commando raid, and part rambunctious caper. There are nods to serious, painful history here, but the script (by George Clooney, who also stars and directs, and Grant Heslov) often seems little more than a spinoff of the Ocean’s Eleven cycle, with Clooney’s version of the Rat Pack working variations on caper-movie riffs made suitable to the particular circumstances of this tale.

Each of the eight top-billed actors (Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban, Hugh Bonneville and Cate Blanchett) gets at least one moment of heroism, a formulaic pattern so obvious that it perhaps undercuts even the more genuine instances. Still, there are several bravura set pieces that succeed: curator Claire Simone (Blanchett) braving errant gunfire on a railway overpass; architect Richard Campbell (Murray) hearing recorded Christmas greetings from his family while showering in bivouac; Campbell and ballet director Preston Savitz (Balaban) improvising a sit-down cease-fire with a lone wild-eyed German infantryman; scholar/officer Frank Stokes (Clooney) performing a moral and psychological take-down on a defiant Nazi SS officer.

Clooney seems to be enjoying himself in the role, but the performance is nothing special. The characters played by Damon and Blanchett are the designated Love Interest, which they perform with casual geniality even when the script inverts the whole idea. Murray and Balaban come across as an arbitrarily designated comedy team, simply being themselves while playing stock war-movie characters with only the skimpiest of nods to their reputed historical models. Young Dimitri Leonidas makes the most of a small, semiobligatory role as Pvt. Sam Epstein, ostensibly a German Jew from New Jersey who joins the group when Stokes commandeers the Jeep he’s driving.

Maybe the best performance is the least obvious one: The burly sculptor Walter Garfield (Goodman) looks like the warrior/titan in the bunch, but consistently behaves like a decent, slightly goofy guy with no taste whatsoever for combat. His dignity and toughness are real, but his body language bespeaks someone with zero interest in playing soldier, let alone looking good, even when heroism is thrust upon him. Murray’s brief, sidelong channeling of the spirit of John Wayne is also a bit of brilliance in the margins.