Subject: The story of Nazi Germany's plundering of Europe's great works of art during World War II and Allied efforts to minimize the damage.**I stole that from IMDb.
Maybe you, like me, get worked up about certain words, so you might read that title and get a little worked up. I did. Then Emily reminded me that it was the name of that myth (although, really, who can keep all "and then Zeus transmogrified into an animal" myths straight) and not just provocation for provocation's sake. So, if you were going to get worked up like me, you needn't.
When I saw the trailer a few months ago, I made light of its basic structure ("Who's the worst ever ever like never before? Nazis!") because it seemed like a strange combination of Godwin's Law and that Israeli anniversary bit from The Colbert Report (Outside of card: Happy Birthday, Israel! Inside: Hitler!). Not that Nazis are funny, per se, but that it seemed ever so slightly like a cheap ploy to find anything to pin on the Nazis and make a quick documentary out of it. Fortunately, I was way off.
Based on the book by Lynn H. Nichols, co-writers and co-directors Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen, and Nicole Newnham don't shy away from the Nazis = evil formula (why should they?), but they are surprisingly neutral for the length of the film. Beautifully narrated by Joan Allen, one of the main cases that Berge, Cohen, and Newnham focus on is Klimt's "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer," a portrait that was stolen from a Jewish family and hung in a museum in Vienna for years. Her niece waged a lengthy legal battle to see the painting returned. The filmmakers present both sides of the case equally and fairly: Austrian officials claim that that is what Adele wanted in her will; the family claims that the will is void because of the theft.
Although the human toll of the war should never be forgotten, the film intelligently and diligently addresses ideas and issues that it never occurs to us to think of as a result. Hitler made a list of works of art he wanted to steal for his museums, and he planned his invasions accordingly. That which he didn't want, that which reflected the wrong ideas or was created by the wrong people, he had destroyed.
But what of art? Who protected the Mona Lisa and kept it from falling into the wrong hands? We meet the daughter of the family that went on the run with da Vinci's masterpiece, and she tells of how they would sometimes open it up, swaddled in red velvet and satin, and she would smile up at them. Berge and co. derive genuine tension from the re-telling of packaging Winged Victory and its descent down the Louvre's steps to make her escape. In St. Petersberg, curators hiding in the basement of the Hermitage would come upstairs to chip snow and ice off the floors, walls, and ceilings after the windows had been shattered by blasts.
Finally, the movie swings around to something I had never heard of: Monument Men. A small unit in the Allied forces, cobbled together of art historians and curators, who spent their time in the service locating and restoring priceless works throughout the region. For his work in attempting to save the Camposanto in Pisa (a process that is still on-going), one Monument Man is interred there.
Though it tells a sorrowful story with grace and compassion, as a documentary it suffers a little from its neturality, and a lot from saving some of the more exciting information until the end in its instance to move forward chronologically and from skirting the psychology that would prompt the art thefts. Even so, it's worth a look. B+
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