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 Debt

Don't look now...your past is gaining on you

Grade: B –

Director: John Madden

Starring: Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson, Ciarán Hinds, Jessica Chastain, Sam Worthington, Marton Csokas and Jasper Christensen

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 44 min.

It takes more than subtitles to translate a movie. Films such as The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and practically Michael Haneke's entire oeuvre, for example, are entertaining in their own right. But their deeper meaning often flows from the cultural vein of their native audiences: Dragon Tattoo reflected its creator's dark vision of Swedish misogyny, while Haneke's Caché draws on the dark past between France and Algeria.

The conundrum becomes magnified when these movies are remade by nonnative filmmakers. The Debt is an American remake of the 2007 Israeli drama-thriller HaHov, which concerns the particularly fraught world of Nazi hunting. Following the war, Israeli intelligence services and private citizens such as Simon Wiesenthal pursued Hitler's former minions, an enterprise that was not without controversy both inside and outside Israel.

The Debt is set in 1997, when three retired Mossad agents—Rachel Singer (Helen Mirren), ex-hubby Stephan (Tom Wilkinson) and David (Ciarán Hinds) must confront the truth behind their incursion inside East Berlin 30 years earlier. Their mission was to locate and apprehend a former Nazi named Dieter Vogel (Jesper Christensen), whose moniker "the Surgeon of Birkenau" clearly models him on Josef Mengele.

The bulk of The Debt, directed by John Madden (Shakespeare in Love), comprises a series of long flashback scenes set at the time of the operation and its aftermath. The exercise to capture and sneak Vogel out of East Germany plays like a taut procedural, particularly a sequence at a rail station in which their plan goes awry. This disruption forces the agents to stow Vogel in their safe house for weeks while they search for an alternate escape route, events that mirror the actual 1960 abduction of Adolf Eichmann by Mossad agents in Argentina. Madden excels in cultivating an espionage-thriller vibe during these sequences that nonetheless hamstrings the present-day scenes by draining them of any philosophical subtext.

The most screen time is dedicated to Rachel, whose later book about the trio's exploits would earn them notoriety. Still, the way the character is written is a muddle: Young Rachel (Jessica Chastain) possesses the mettles to submit to Vogel's gynecological exams, yet she's so needy that, even in the middle of this delicate mission, she drunkenly and arbitrarily throws herself at both of her male co-workers on the same night, forming a haphazard love triangle that informs the story without really improving it.

Even so, the 30-year-old Chastain, last seen in The Help and Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, acquits herself quite well. On the other hand, most of the other actors, particularly Mirren, Wilkinson and Sam Worthington (who plays young David), fret and frown a lot. And Hinds doesn't have time to even do that, appearing only once after his character throws himself in front of a passing truck in the film's opening scene.

The Debt's most intriguing characters are two of its secondary ones. Stephan (the younger version portrayed by Marton Csokas) portrays an intriguing clash of sniveling self-interest and earnest patriotism. And the way Vogel deciphers and exploits his captors' psychological vulnerabilities is Lecter-esque: even though Vogel is bound and gagged, he's the one who is truly in control.

Unfortunately, the screenwriting team of Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman (Stardust, Kick-Ass and X-Men: First Class) fails to pivot The Debt from its sheer suspense elements into a film possessing any discernable political, cultural or emotional nuance. It culminates with a journey to Ukraine by Mirren's Rachel and a finale more befitting one of Brian De Palma's campy climaxes. Apparently certain types of cinema are universal, after all.

Neil Morris

The Ghost Writer

Investigating a possible war criminal?
There's an app for that.

Grade: A –

Director: Roman Polanski

Starring: Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Kim Cattrall, Tom Wilkerson, and Olivia Williams

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hours, 8 minutes

Roman Polanski continues to use the silver screen to both explicate and exorcise his personal demons. From surviving Nazi persecution as a child in the Kraków ghetto to the brutal murder of his wife Sharon Tate at the hands of the Manson family to his conviction – and subsequent flight from sentencing – for having sex with a 13-year-old girl, Polanski’s real-life travails have informed and defined his film oeuvre.

Reportedly, Polanski had to complete editing of The Ghost Writer from the confines of a jail cell and then under house arrest at his Swiss chalet as he fights extradition back to the United States. In his grand return to the modern thriller (his first since 1988’s Frantic), a former British prime minister, Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), finds himself living as a virtual exile in a foreign land, partly to escape prosecution for legitimate charges nonetheless brought in a kangaroo court by accusers with duplicitous motives. Sound familiar? There is a lot more than a Napoleon complex going on in Polanski’s mind when Lang’s wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams), compares her husband’s hermetic life on a windswept patch of Martha’s Vineyard to Bonaparte’s banishment to the island of St. Helena.

That other unique and proverbial Polanski archetype – the inquisitive, self-assured loner who foolhardily believes he has a grasp on matters that are actually well beyond his comprehension – comes in the form of a nameless author credited as “The Ghost” (Ewan McGregor), hired as a replacement ghostwriter for Lang’s memoirs after the original scribe met an untimely death.

Lang is under investigation for sanctioning war crimes while in office, chiefly acts of rendition against terrorist suspects, and this premise propels the ghostwriter’s eventual efforts to connect the dots between his predecessor’s demise and the high-stakes political intrigue at play. It is worth comparing Polanski’s use of current events to Green Zone, Paul Greengrass’ polemical Iraq War actioner. Greengrass created fictitious characters and a plot whose unrealized purpose was to elucidate its real-life backdrop. By contrast, Polanski shrewdly exploits a topical controversy solely to service a fictional storyline, in the same way the real battle over water rights in California was mere window-dressing for the personal mystery and psychological drama at the center of Polanski’s Chinatown.

The Ghost Writer thrives on atmospherics, artistry, and acting. Polanski’s skills as a visual virtuoso remain in fine form. He brackets Ghost Writer with silent images portending unseen deaths – the first a shot of an abandoned car sitting alone on a ferry boat intercut with a body washed ashore bobbing in the surf; the last the sublime sight of hundreds of pieces of paper gradually being blown into view as they progressively litter a city street. In between, Polanski and screenwriter Robert Harris – adapting his own novel, The Ghost – fashion a plot that is both morose and pulpy. Accented by Alexandre Desplat’s haunting, orchestral score, Polanski constructs set pieces so tense and finely tuned that they would be labeled “Hitchcockian” if this was any other director.

McGregor reclaims much of his lost luster, ably supplying his role with the right blend of self-assuredness and vulnerability. Brosnan plays Lang as a cross between Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, while Williams is mesmerizing as the emotionally bruised but politically savvy first lady (shades of Hilary?). There are also sharp supporting turns from Kim Cattrall as Lang’s longtime assistant (and perhaps more), Timothy Hutton, James Belushi, Eli Wallach, and Tom Wilkinson as one of Lang’s shadowy acquaintances.

But the real star is Polanski. Whatever his personal travails, he remains a master filmmaker. And, neo-noirs like The Ghost Writer are not only his distinctive wheelhouse, but also a welcome throwback to clever, taut political-conspiracy thrillers. This is the old stuff…this is the good stuff.

Neil Morris

Inglourious Basterds

I intern your milkshake

Grade: B

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Starring: Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Eli Roth, Diane Kruger, and Daniel Brühl

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hours, 32 minutes

To proclaim Inglourious Basterds is Quentin Tarantino’s fourth-best film (ahead of only the indulgent, indolent Death Proof) is not an insult, as each entry in this top quartet exceeds the finest production most directors will ever generate.

Still, the film’s relatively relegated status is interesting since Tarantino’s long-rumored World War II flick has been a pet project dating back to his immediate post-Pulp Fiction years. Like all Tarantino movies, Basterds is largely homage, principally – says the director – as a “spaghetti western but with World War II iconography.” There are also overt allusions to so-called “macaroni combat” flicks – the Italian exploitation war movies of the 1960s, 70s and 80s – as well as French New Wave cinema.

Of course, there is also Tarantino’s distinctive pulpy, madcap mayhem buttressed by an underlying, underrated maturity. Few filmmakers are afforded the latitude Tarantino enjoys to methodically develop scenes and storylines. This freedom sometimes leads to sequences that are rudderless, drifting on with no discernible payoff. However, it also produces gems like the opening, 20-minute long “Chapter One” of Basterds. Armed only with guile and a glass of milk, SS Col. Hans Landa, played sensationally by Austrian actor Christoph Waltz in an Oscar-caliber performance, interrogates a French dairy farmer suspected of harboring Jews. The scene reinforces Tarantino’s affinity for Sergio Leone, and it also crackles with QT’s trademark visual and dialogue flourishes. Unlike most filmmakers, the excitement and tension in a Tarantino film largely derives from the fact that you never know how any particular scene will end, and Basterds is no exception.

After the opening act, we are then introduced to the key players for the rest of the interwoven storyline. First is Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), a thickly accented Tennessee hillbilly leading a motley crew of eight Jewish American soldiers nicknamed the “Basterds,” whose mission is to comp the European countryside looking to kill and scalp “Nat-zzies.” Later, we meet a Jewish woman going by the name of Emmanuelle Mimieux (Mélanie Laurent), the proprietress of a Parisian cinema that is forced to play German films by Leni Riefenstahl and G.W. Pabst. (In one of the film’s more memorable lines, Mimieux explains that she displays the names of filmmakers on the theater’s marquee because “In France, we revere our directors.”)

In typical Tarantino fashion, these diffuse plotlines gradually intersect around a blazing, bombastic finale set around the premiere of the latest Nazi propaganda film by Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth), called A Nation’s Pride, which dramatizes on the heroic exploits of a German soldier (Daniel Brühl) who also harbors affections for Mimieux. QT’s love of cinema is the principal sidelight in Bastards, with characters who provide a virtual audio tour through early 20^th century Weimar cinema.

As in his previous works, Tarantino wrings tension out of the clash of characters with varying class and cultural backgrounds. He distills World War II into one giant race war (not without basis) and takes a baseball bat to Hitler’s vision of the “master race” with irony and volume by conjuring a conspicuously multiculti milieu. American soldiers impersonate Italians; a British lieutenant and film buff (Michael Fassbender) plays a German officer; Mimieux is a Jew masquerading as a Frenchwoman whose lover is her African projectionist. Aldo himself claims to be part-Apache Indian, and the Basterds end up adopting guerilla tactics patterned after Native Americans. Even in the epic opening scene, Landa starts out speaking in French until he and the Gallic farmer compromise by communicating in English.

Of course, the vehicle for all this would-be social commentary is a violent, rollicking fever-dream. And, yes, Tarantino’s nearly unchecked filmmaking freedom again manifests itself in occasional self-indulgence, particularly his infatuation with the sound of his scripts – Aldo acts as Tarantino’s mouthpiece during the film’s anticlimactic coda, declaring that his latest bit of sadistic handiwork “just might be my masterpiece.”

Thankfully, the grotesque use of the Holocaust as a justification for stylized revenge and Tarantino’s brand of comic brutality is largely confined to the film’s second chapter and its misleading trailers. Inglourious Basterds is audacious, entertaining, uneven, and imaginary. It is no “masterpiece,” but it’s far from inglorious.

Neil Morris