'The Monuments Men': Not even a well-chosen cast can save Clooney's WWII film

City Paper grade: C-

George Clooney's fifth directorial outing tells the true(-ish) story of the Monuments Men, a group of men at the upper end of the greatest generation tasked with preserving and rescuing Europe's great art and architecture from the Nazis. It's a curious story that should allow for a fresh perspective on WWII (author Robert Edsel has written three gripping books on the subject), but Clooney uses it as an occasion to make a throwback tribute to the all-star war movies of the 1960s. Down to the whistle-and-snare march theme by composer Alexandre Desplat, The Monuments Men harkens back to The Great Escape or The Dirty Dozen with its breezy male bonding and aw-shucks nobility. At the same time, Clooney-as-director struggles with the big question of whether saving Western civilization's greatest masterpieces is worth the loss of even a single human life, which he usually solves by giving soaring monologues to Clooney-as-actor. As a filmmaker he seems uneasy about the dilemma, shifting from race-against-time heroics to sudden polemics on man's inhumanity to man, as when Bob Balaban finds the frame of a destroyed Picasso only to be silenced by Matt Damon's discovery of barrels filled with extracted gold fillings. The result becomes an odd amalgam of the earnest propagandizing of Good Night, and Good Luck and the cornball retro humor of his forgotten '20s football farce Leatherheads. Not even the well-chosen cast (which includes Bill Murray, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin and Hugh Bonneville) can bridge that disconnect, leading to an unexpectedly aimless adventure.