Movie Doubles - 'The Monuments Men' & 'The Grand Budapest Hotel'

The Bill Murray & Bob Balaban Double

It's purely coincidental, but both these actors were in both these films andI happened to catch them back to back. Apart from that, it's going to be hard to talk about these two films because the only other thing they have in common is a valuation of art. Yes, there is a painting in TGBH that is crucial to the plot and in the film universe, considered invaluable. TMM of course is about rescuing art held captive by the retreating Nazis.

The Value Of Art

'Monuments Men' makes an obvious appeal to the arts by sending in a bunch of art-loving professional guys played by stars and character actors to save the day. The bad guys are a Hollywood staple, the Nazis, led by Adolf Hitler, who himself once aspired to being an artist. It's sort of funny because if the Nazis were holding a sexy girl sexy, it doesn't make it sexy to rescue that girl. And so as the Nazis hold the art hostage, it's not very artistic when the art gets rescued. This might just be a kind of limit for entertainment to depict value of art.

'The Grand Budapest Hotel' proceeds to show us a work of art in what is a kind of an art house movie, then tries to parody the sort of explanations people give for art in an ironic attempt to establish a sense - an ever so faint and slightly cliched - of value in art. The funny thing about this film is that if a bunch of people pointed at a girl and said she was sexy, it doesn't therefore make the girl sexy. In the same way, a bunch of people saying art is valuable, doesn't make art valuable, in of itself.

Okay, I'll give the sexy girl metaphor a rest. Enough with the gratuitous sexism.

But you see the point. Value of Art in both films is a signifier that purports to point at the signified and there's actually a blank page on the signified. 'The Monuments Men' does mention that Hitler had aspirations to being an artist as a young man and his failure to fulfil that dream led in a twisted, vicious way for him to transform himself into the greatest (as in highest billing) villain of the Twentieth Century. If you want to see a really great film about that story, you should check out 'Max' starring John Cusack and Noah Taylor. It digs very deeply into the tortured story of how Hitler might have come to choose politics over art. 'The Monuments Men' merely hints at the struggle, and yet it is that very struggle that is both the struggle of 'Mein Kampf' as well as everything Hitler unleashed which includes the art confiscation against which the story takes place. The failure to go deeply into that problem weakens the importance of this film, because Hitler himself clearly believed in the value of Art. It went without saying for Hitler.

Perhaps it is then appropriate that the film is more interested in a showing us Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who at least in the film seems rather unconvinced of the value of art and so is rather unconvinced of the merits of the mission. If art needs rescuing form the vaguely evil (or taken as read to be evil) clutches of Hitler and his art-confiscating henchmen, then 'The Grand Budapest Hotel' posits that Art needs rescuing from a materially possessive, spiritually bankrupt bourgeoisie wealthy. It is a subtle Marxist message that gets lost in the rather tepid screwball comedy. Everybody understand that art is valuable - it's just they don't understand what it means. But then again, who does?

Egalitarianism And The Untenable Art

The characters in 'Monuments Men' are portrayed as everyday people with extraordinary interest and knowledge in art. However the film might couch it, such men are hardly everyday people. A lifetime career in the arts, even as a curator takes tremendous learning and perseverance. One doesn't endure in such jobs without being part of the intelligentsia and not the lumpenproletariat. As such, the airs of egalitarianism in 'The Monuments Men' is a totally imagined, typically American concoction.

'The Grand Budapest Hotel' revels in the social climbing exhibited by Ralph Fiennes' M. Gustave H.  The inheriting of a priceless work of art -featuring an apple as if it were the very forbidden fruit - is the pinnacle achievement of his lifetime of sucking up to and pleasuring the bourgeoisie. The class distinction plays implicitly in M. Gustave H.'s predicament of a man who inherits the most meaningful thing ahead of the family. The film places art with a meaning beyond its own importance as art, it is doubly the trophy of the moneyed set independent of its inherent value.

All this breeds a strange paranoia about art. That perhaps art is laughing back at the ordinary man on the street together with the bourgeoisie who use it as currency. In 'Monuments Men', FDR's scepticism comes precisely because he suspects art embodies the problems of class, that class struggle engenders conflicts that lead to the rise of Hitler. It is no mere coincidence at all that a man rejected by an art academy sets about threatening the very foundations of civilisation in Europe. And so FDR is right to ask Clooney's character Frank Stokes whether it is worth the effort. When the film shows the aged Stokes saying "Yes", thirty years after the fact, it is too pat an answer. The problem goes much deeper than the film describes.

Excellence gives rise to elitism. Elitism gives rise to social Darwinism and ultimately fascism. Unlikely as it seems, in the very brilliance of a DaVinci or a Michelangelo lies the intellectual seeds of the Italian Fascist state of the Twentieth Century. Perhaps we should all hope for bad art.