Film Carew: The Monuments Men, Hannah Arendt

THE MONUMENTS MEN

Bumped to the post-Oscars dumping-ground after generating little-to-no Awards buzz, you can see why The Monuments Men didn't find a foothold in a season that sought to make amends for slavery, the treatment of early AIDS victims, and the hubris of journeying into God's final frontier, space. George Clooney's latest directorial effort is a minor caper-comedy, like Ocean's Eleven set to the jaunty tin-whistles and martial drums of military-music irony; Clooney and Matt Damon assembling a Dad's Army of art experts (including Bob Balaban, Bill Murray, John Goodman, and Jean Dujardin) tasked with attempting to save the priceless artworks being destroyed by a fleeing German army at the end of World War II.

Clooney's opening explain-the-premise lecture features a Mel Brooks-esque map of Nazi Europe; the opening credits are a cutesy getting-the-gang-together montage; Goodman going through basic training is fat-guy-exercising funny; Balaban is like Hans Moleman in a helmet; Damon, on foot in France, croaks up Frog in comically-awful subtitles; and a pursuing Russian commander - out to seize the same priceless art as the Americans, but as villain - is some Boss Hog figure, ready to throw his hat in the dirt each time he arrives at a secret Nazi-art stash only to have found doze dukes have got there first. It's a film of bonhomie, japery, and dad jokes; but, in that, it seems to know what it wants to be.

Yet, in contrast - and incongruous - to such hijinks, The Monuments Men has those over determined moments of clip-reel meaningfulness. These usually come when Gorgeous George, twinkle in his eye, turns and stares at the horizon, and starts waxing rhapsodic about the mission they're tasked with. Uptight army suits may think it a waste of resources, a triviality, but Clooney clearly sees art as cultural capitol, as hallmark of human history; and to set ablaze a Rembrandt is to turn humans themselves into ash, floating unmoored from their cultural forebears.

People start dying, the music turns sad, and the American flag starts fluttering. It's your standard piece of Hollywood war propaganda, with a determinedly old-fashioned tone to match. And it's hard to know when the writing is at its worst: when Damon shakes his head, and laments of Hitler(!), “he really wanted it all, didn't he?”; or some dude playing a not-entirely-impressed Truman says of the whole adventure (and as-if to-camera), “30 years from now, will anyone remember that these men died?” And, really, the writing is the problem. That the film's comic, tragic, and heroic elements fail to gel is indicative of its macro failing, which is as a piece of storytelling.

Clooney and Grant Heslov pen a script that breaks up the gang, Scooby Doo-style, apportioning the narrative into Buddy Cop duos tasked with singular missions. As Clooney - who, going from Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind, to Good Night, And Good Luck., to Leatherheads, to The Ides Of March, to The Monuments Men, is a director delivering diminishing returns - cuts between these episodic tales, there's no sense of momentum, not even when we're suddenly racing against the Russians. So many parts of the story feel superfluous, or undercooked, or semi-embarrassing; like a whole lamentable Cate Blanchett-as-French-resistance-art-curator turn that's probably best not to get into. Let's just say she's bookish and uptight until the moment she lets her hair down and gets sexy. Her seduction fails; and, on a grander scale, so does Clooney's.

Why so serious?

HANNAH ARENDT

Margarethe von Trotta's latest film about the life and times of an iconic German woman - political philosopher Hannah Arendt, author of The Origins Of Totalitarianism, played here by von Trotta's longtime muse Barbara Sukowa - dares to be a discussion-piece. It recreates not only the divide of opinions on the trial of Nazi war-criminal Adolf Eichmann in Israel in 1961, but the even-sharper division of opinions of Arendt's writings thereon, Eichmann In Jerusalem: A Report On The Banality Of Evil, and reopens their debate. Often that means we sit around watching people have impassioned dinner-party conversations. At their worst, these seem like cheap pieces of period-setting (who's gonna win: Nixon or Kennedy?), but at their best they make the themes of the film come alive, and prompt an audience to examine their own morals.

Von Trotta makes the provocative decision to insert real footage from Eichmann's trial; the grainy black-and-white initially jarring with the classically-lit, softly-lensed, matinée-esque digital-colour of the drama. But she shows the real Eichmann to evince Arendt's perception of him: that, as far as icons of 'evil' go, he's the most banal; a feckless, bureaucratic intermediary - “he's a nobody,” Sukowa declares - whose crime is only to have blindly, amorally obeyed orders; that to try a man not for his own actions, but as a symbol of history, makes it a show trial. Arendt's ideas feel more relevant than ever, and they're the best thing about Hannah Arendt. The movie constructed around those ideas - around, in so many the ways, the real footage - has, however, very real limits: the dramatic lighting, the overdetermined music, and the semi-embarrassing flashbacks (to an idealist-student youth in which intellectual-titan-turned-Nazi-turncoat Heidegger broke our heroine's hymen, then her heart) the stuff of minor arthouse fluff.