I’d been meaning to watch this ever since it came out in 2014. I’m a sucker for WW2 stories, and I like art, so I was curious to see a WW2 story about people dedicated to protecting art (with a basis in history). I wasn’t disappointed, but the movie was an odd experience. 

There’s a quote attributed to François Truffaut, “There’s no such thing as an anti-war film.” The Monuments Men might be the closest I’ve seen a movie come. But it also felt tremendously self-satisfied to me, in a way that eroded that anti-war feel. Let me explain.

My understanding of the quote attributed to François Truffaut is that cinema is the wrong medium for creating an anti-war message. No matter how anti-war a movie is, war on the big screen will appear exciting and electrifying, full of spectacle and actions easy to valorize. The Monuments Men avoids or resists that by being… boring.

Boring is the wrong word. I wasn’t bored watching this movie. But this is not an action movie.

The few scenes of combat that occur in this movie are not glorious. Moreover, it’s hard to watch them and think of the actions anyone takes as being glorious. None of the main characters do anything that is easy to read as martial heroics.

By contrast, a show like Band of Brothers contains a potent anti-war message, something like “war is terrible, and it scars those who are exposed to it.” But it presents that message alongside countless depictions of heroic, or glorious, or valorized behavior. People risk their lives to rescue their comrades. People fight a war against a truly heinous foe (fuck Nazis). People step up to take care of each other and to not let their fellows down. Even the title of the show is in on it: the line of Shakespeare that it quotes comes from Henry V’s St Crispin’s Day speech, in which Henry V rallies his outnumbered soldiers to face their foe the following day, promising them glory and camaraderie.

With Band of Brothers, it’s easy to believe François Truffaut. Yet somehow, because The Monuments Men deflates the martial heroics of each of its scenes of combat (or potential combat), I think there might just be a world in which François Truffaut could be wrong. The first step, I think, is to focus on people whose primary task is entirely orthogonal to combat.

The Monuments Men does precisely that. Each of the characters we follow participates in the greater struggle of WW2, but they do it for art, and they do it by looking up numbers and names, by poring over maps, by studying pieces of art for identifying marks. These are not the glamorous scenes that the cinematic gaze typically glorifies. They’re quiet, they’re subdued. Occasionally they’re exciting, but mostly via the characters’ own excitement about some piece of dry minutia. There are a few moments of gunfire and combat, but in every case these scenes implicitly diminish the feats of arms involved, if any—fights are lost, foes are never seen or are not what was expected, people sit and talk. 

Perhaps The Monuments Men finally breaks tradition. Perhaps it can be an anti-war war movie. Except… the movie has a message. 

Specifically, the movie says that art and history are worth preserving, worth risking one’s life to preserve, and that people should not have their art or history taken from them or destroyed. The heroes voluntarily risk their lives to preserve art. They sacrifice themselves to make sure that people’s history is not erased. And—according to the movie—the heroes are content to have done so.

Let’s be clear: the Nazis are the bad guys, both in the movie and in real life. The movie’s heroes are dedicated to stopping the Nazis. The heroes are preserving as much of the art of Europe as they can, and returning that art to its owners wherever they can be found. The heroes oppose Nazis who are dead set on collecting everything they can for Hitler’s museum, and destroying anything which they cannot keep or which does not match their ideology. “The Nazis are the bad guys, doing bad things,” is an easy argument to make, and the movie makes that argument pretty clearly.

I’m pretty sure I agreed that what the heroes did was good before I saw the movie. I certainly feel like I agree with them about that now. But I’m aware of the focused power of the movie’s message, and something about its presentation reads as both self-aware and self-satisfied to me.

That self-satisfaction might dash my whole hope of this being an anti-war film to pieces. The Monuments Men feels like it knows precisely what message it wants to share, and it knows that it’s done a good job of sharing it. It knows that its message has the moral high ground. It knows that the characters it follows have the moral high ground. And this moral virtue, and the movie’s satisfaction with this moral virtue, spreads by association to the whole military affair in which the main characters are involved.

While the heroes aren’t performing martial heroics, they’re entwined with those who are. Thus despite being difficult to read as a pro-war movie through the visuals or presentation, The Monuments Men is implicitly an argument in favor of at least some wars. After all, you’ve got to fight the Nazis.

Personally, I agree with that. But it does mean that, despite some wrangling, I think François Truffaut wins again.