The Monuments Men

Does anybody know when Brad Pitt's

supposed to get here?

Grade: C +

Director: George Clooney

Starring: George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, Cate Blanchett, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Hugh Bonneville and Bob Balaban

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 58 min.

Originally slated for release in the heart of the December movie awards season, The Monuments Men was suddenly pushed into the February dump zone mere weeks before its scheduled opening. Considering the pedigree of its filmmakers and cast, the change was jarring and foreboding. The good news is that writer, director and star George Clooney’s latest vanity project is not the unadulterated disaster its release date portends. The bad news? The impetus for shifting that release date is patently clear.

Adapted by Clooney and longtime collaborator Grant Heslov from a book by Robert M. Edsel, the film tells the little-known true story of an Allied task force assigned to traverse the European theatre and save millions of pieces of art and other culturally significant items from the Nazis near the end of World War II, especially before their destruction on orders from Adolf Hitler.

Frank Stokes (Clooney), the leader of the squad, recruits a band of past-their-prime art experts. However, instead of an earnest, dramatic rendering of their mission and the motives of their adversaries, the breezy screenplay pairs its protagonists off in order to conjure subplots and kill screentime. So, John Goodman and Jean Dujardin play the ugly American and sophisticated Frenchman. Bill Murray and Bob Balaban carry on a dull Mutt & Jeff routine. And, George Clooney and Brit Hugh Bonneville are full of charm and charisma. Meanwhile, Matt Damon travels to Paris to woo information out of a wary former museum curator, played by Cate Blanchett.

Yes, it’s Ocean’s WWII, except that amid the wise-cracking homage to the homespun Hollywood war pictures of yesteryear, there are deaths and other deadly serious subject matter at hand that lend the film a tonal inconsistency. Clooney and Damon are charming enough, but Murray is virtually neutered. Meanwhile, Blanchett’s role is fatally uneven—one moment she’s aiding the French resistance, the next she’s inexplicably jailed for being a Nazi collaborator; she goes to tremendous lengths (including the offscreen death of her brother) to keep artwork from being removed by the Nazis, yet she tarries when the Americans ask for her help in retrieving it (presumably to chew up even more screentime).

Indeed, there are extended sequences that exist for seemingly no reason other than eating up the nearly two hour running time—other examples include Murray and Balaban’s nocturnal encounter with a young German soldier, and the squad’s slaphappy response after Damon’s character accidently stands on a landmine.

Ultimately, the actual race to retrieve the works of Rembrandt, Rubens and Rodin before the Nazis can torch them or the Ruskies can pilfer for themselves occupies the final act of the film. By then, The Monuments Men has mustered all the heft of a History Channel docudrama. That’s not all bad, especially if it awakens viewers young and old to the importance of classical art. But, a stroll through a gallery might accomplish the same thing and be twice as exciting.

The Wolf of Wall Street

Flair Jordan

Grade: A–

Director: Martin Scorses

Starring: Leonardo DiCapiro, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie, Matthew McConaughey, Kyle Chandler, Rob Reiner, Jon Favreau and Jean Dujardin

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 3 hr.

After a career spent exploring the mean streets of his beloved New York City, Martin Scorsese finally trains his lense on its most corrupt, nefarious byway: Wall Street. And whether motivated by guilt, revelation or inspiration, Scorsese amply compensates for previous oversights with The Wolf of Wall Street, a three-hour Grand Guignol of white-collar decadence.

In the memoir of stock swindler Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCapiro), Scorsese finds his gateway into the feral financial markets of the 1980s and 90s that ushered in the likes of Belfort and his outlaw brokerage firm, Stratton Oakmont. By day, Belfort and his disciplines peddle junk stocks onto unwitting marks. After hours, their trading floor becomes a Caligulan debach, where brokers blow off steam using profanity, prostitutes, alcohol, marching bands and dwarf-tossing. Testosterone flows freely, and hookers are ranked in descending order of quality as “blue chip,” “Nasdaq,” and “pink sheets.” And, oh, the drugs. Belfort’s likes his ludes and cocaine, but his hallucinogenic holy grail is the Lemmon 714, whose discovery features in (quite arguably) the film’s most maddcap sequence involving Belfort, his skeevy friend Donnie (Jonah Hill), a Ferrari, and juxtaposing Popeye's spinach with inhaling a vial of blow.

The ungainly core of The Wolf of Wall Street isn’t an exhaustive exposé of our bacchanalian securities market or even an engrossing biopic. This is Scorsese’s raised middle finger to the orgy of excess endemic to a privileged class that flouted while Rome nearly burned. But that protruding digit is also directed somewhere else.

The Wolf of Wall Street is the imperfect but audacious product of a seemingly younger, feistier director … or a cinematic capo di tutti capi looking to reclaim his turf. American Hustle, another Greed Decade favorite of this holiday season, has been called an homage to the 71-year-old Scorsese. But if that film is Scorsese redux, The Wolf of Wall Street is Scorsese 2.0.

*Originally published at Indyweek.com