Matt Damon: ‘I’m looking for a job and holding out for something good’
If you put a room full of A-list actors into GI uniforms and send them across wartime Europe in pursuit of looted art what do you get? It clearly took George Clooney some time to decide: slated for release in December 2013, the Monuments Men spent extra time in the edit, while the director balanced a gentle ensemble comedy with the deadly serious backdrop of war and genocide.
The result, according to co-star Matt Damon, is a movie that “feels like it was made in the 1960s – absent the cynicism that got into our war movies after 1970. It’s about a group of people who decided that art was worth their lives”.
Damon plays a character based on a real-life curator at the New York Met, James Rorimer, who together with a team of art historians were dispatched into France and Germany after D-Day to try and rescue some five million items of looted art. Some paid with their lives. He plays opposite Cate Blanchett, whose character is based on Rose Valland, the French curator who secretly logged the Nazis’ art thefts from the Jeu de Paumes museum in Paris, where she worked.
The message of the movie is laid on heavily at times by Clooney, who plays the team’s leader: that if the Nazis could wipe out Europe’s cultural heritage, as ordered in Hitler’s 1945 “Nero Decree”, they could snatch a perverse moral triumph even as the Reich went up in flames.
When I ask how that message translates for today’s audience, Damon says bluntly: “The Monuments Men weren’t in Baghdad.” With large-scale cultural destruction during the US occupation of Iraq, some perpetrated by the US military itself, Damon says:
“Priceless cultural treasures were looted, lost or destroyed. I couldn’t read this story without thinking about that.
“Art is always the first thing in the school budget that gets the axe – when times are tough like they are now – so I think it’s a good time to have a conversation about what is the role of art in our culture and civilisation.”
Clooney has said he wanted this to be a movie without cynicism: a feel-good movie about positive values. But both men are well aware this is just the latest blast of a culture war liberal Hollywood is fighting with right-wing America.
Damon previously starred in Elysium – a class-war-in-space movie directed by Neill Blomkamp – whose in-your-face themes of poverty and inequality drove Fox News commentators into a frenzy. Last month he turned up in Davos to receive an award for his work with the charity water.org.
I ask: “How did it feel in Davos – have any of them actually watched Elysium?” He winces: “I think they all live on Elysium, don’t know if they saw the movie.”
Damon’s public support for – and left-wing criticisms of – the Obama administration prompt the question: does he ever feel like diving into politics himself? Doesn’t the US liberal left need somebody with a heart and communications skills?
“I think we have someone in the White House with heart and communications,” says Damon, adding: “The short answer is no – I will not be going into politics. I love what I do and I’m able to throw rocks from the sidelines and hopefully it can move the needle.
“I’m unabashedly liberal. There are places where there is a chasm that feels unbridgeable – I think Obama has worked tirelessly to bridge that but there is a historic intransigence, at times worse than Lincoln dealt with. When you are dealing with people willing to shut down government for their beliefs, it starts to feel like there is an impasse.”
Damon has, in the past five years, tried to push the boundaries of what a Hollywood movie can do politically. Elysium was a critique of the 1 per cent. The anti-fracking movie Promised Land (2012) struggled at the box office, in a country whose economic revival has been fuelled by cheap gas.
But neither film turned out as sharply polemical as the man himself is in real life – about social injustice in America and poverty in the world.
“There’s only so much making movies can solve,” he says. “It’s about elections – the right are going to have to lose some elections. When that happens they will come around. The demographics aren’t with them and that will become clear.”
The Monuments Men is wistful to the point where some reviewers, and maybe parts of the younger audience, will find it difficult. There is a long scene, set during the Battle of the Bulge when the 82nd Airborne Division fought surrounded, where a disembodied a-capella voice sings the whole of “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” while GIs struggle to survive in sub-zero conditions.
Because the film abjures the action movie devices – tension, torture and testosterone – it is hard for the action to illustrate what’s at stake in these moments. Clooney resorts at times to symbolism: at one point the men discover a barrel full of gold rings and gold teeth looted from victims of the Holocaust.
To a modern audience the narrative arc will feel uncompressed – that is, there is not a plot point on every page of the screenplay. But I think it works – the ensemble acting alone is a kind of masterclass of what you can achieve with grainy faces.
It’s unashamedly a film about men past their prime. Even Damon – the romantic lead – is depicted with a dab of grey hair. And, without revealing the plot, even for him there are slim pickings in terms of boy-girl romance.
“That’s the story – the story is these grey-haired guys getting into the war. It’s fun to watch John Goodman go through basic training, that’s the movie – and I have grey hair. I have four kids now and man did my hair go grey quickly.”
Damon won an academy award for co-writing the script of his breakthrough film, Good Will Hunting. To see him, in the space of 12 months, play the pumped-up LA street-fighter in Elysium, and the shy, graying character he plays in Monuments Men prompts the inevitable question: where does an action hero go at the age of 42?
“I haven’t worked since I made this and I am looking for a job,” he says. “But the problem is piracy is a huge deal – it’s eating into 40 per cent of the industry’s market share. So there are different jobs becoming available and very little of the movies that I really want to make. So I’m on a hiatus right now. I’m holding out for something good.”
The great Hollywood social critiques happened when big actors and big directors put budgets and reputations on the line in movies that confronted cynicism and overcame it. Monuments Men is not quite that, but you can see what they were trying to do.
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