Sometimes you want to like a movie just because its heart is in the right place. The soul hardens, though, as the movie creaks by the 150-minute mark and flaws become harder to forgive.
With Miracle at St. Anna, director Spike Lee continues his move into more standard genre studio fare. His last movie, 2006’s Inside Man, was a tight heist film that showed Lee’s ability to go “mainstream” while still imbuing everything with his personality. To a degree that’s true in Miracle at St. Anna as well, but the key word missing from the formula is “tight.” The movie is spread so thin in so many directions that a central idea no longer remains identifiable. Heck, I’m still trying to figure out what the miracle at St. Anna’s mentioned in the title might possibly refer to.
Lee has been vocal in his criticisms of Hollywood whitewashing World War II, most recently criticizing Clint Eastwood for not putting any black faces on Iwo Jima in Flag of Our Fathers. While that example is debatable, he raises a good point, and Miracle at St. Anna is his answer to that. The core of the movie is four men from a company of Buffalo soldiers who get separated from the front (when a white commander doesn’t believe their radioed situation report and orders artillery fire into their location) and are on their own behind enemy lines in northern Italy.
Lee and screenwriter James McBride (adapting his own novel) can’t just get to that, of course. In a movie full of distractions, it actually starts with a distraction. In 1983, a postal employee shoots a customer buying stamps without any apparent provocation. The resulting investigation discovers a valuable statue in his closet. Only then, 15 minutes into the movie, do we move onto the important stuff. During this filler you’ll see almost everything that was in the commercial for the movie and just about all of the widely recognizable actors. John Turturro, John Lequizamo, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt all get their only screen time here. One almost suspects Spike Lee of baiting the audience into the theater with known actors and once the lights go down saying, “You may have expected the Hollywood tradition of using white actors to tell black stories but this is all you’re getting of them.” I admire the maneuver, whether intentional or not.
That, however, doesn’t give the wasted 15 minutes any greater value to the overall movie, and does actual damage in creating an expectation of a greay mystery to be revealed. There is no mystery; just the story of what happened to these four young men.
The four men are Bishop (Michael Ealy), Hector (Laz Alonso), Train (Omar Benson Miller), and Stamps (Derek Luke). As is required for a war movie, each falls into a readily identifiable niche. Bishop is a skirt-chasing former preacher who takes a confrontational approach to race relations. Train is the lovable idiot giant of a man with no malice for anyone, who doesn’t really understand where he is or why he’s there. Stamps is the ranking member of the group, educated and torn between believing that by stepping up as a soldier he is breaking ground for blacks in America and the fact that he isn’t really seeing any change. Hector is, to the extent there is one in this muddle, our narrator. He’s actually Puerto Rican so exists somewhat outside of the race struggle. He’s also the one who eventually shoots an Italian customer in the post office, so we know he at least will survive.
To separate this band from the rest of the American army, Spike Lee chooses to try and show up both Clint Eastwood (Flags of Our Fathers/Sands of Iwo Jima) and Steven Spielberg (Saving Private Ryan) in visually presenting the horrors of war. When George Company gets caught between Nazi machine guns and friendly fire, there is no restraint in showing the blood flying, the severed limbs, and bodies floating downriver. Everybody has long since staked out their own personal view on whether this unflinching presentation of war is a good thing or a bad thing, so just know that it’s there. Only once in the entire movie could Lee be said to flinch from showing humanity at its worst and, personally, I thank him for the moment of restraint.
Thus concludes the battle elements of the movie. There is certainly more fighting and violence but it is almost entirely removed from a battlefield context and ends up more like John Woo gun fights (with machine guns) than actual combat. Anyway, the four end up behind enemy lines, where they find a wounded boy named Angelo (9-year-old Matteo Sciarbordi making his screen debut) and they take him to a nearby village for assistance. Once there, the movie finally figuratively flies a thousand directions as if a narrative mortar shell had scored a direct hit.
There are detours into the Italian resistance and Fascist loyalists. A long scene involving a debate between a bad Nazi and a not quite so bad Nazi. Plenty of speech-making about how black soldiers should feel about fighting a war for a country that doesn’t particularly want them. The mystery of where Angelo came from. A love, or more accurately lust, triangle. Hints of something mystical involving a legend about a nearby mountain. What exactly happened at St. Anna’s. A flashback to basic training to show just how ambivelant America was about black soldiers.
WIthout a doubt there is good stuff in most of these detours. They just don’t all need to be in the same movie and so apparently given equal weight that eventually your mind just refuses to engage any of them. At one point Stamps mentions the irony that he feels more free behind enemy lines in an Italian village than he has ever felt at home (because in Italy he is just an American). That one line is a powerful idea that would have been a great core for the movie, but it is just thrown out there and let be.
After a scene where a particularly raw bit of racism is shown, the camera cuts to the four soldiers staring into the camera, as if directly indicting the audience for our shameful past and implicitly asking whether we should be at all ashamed of our present. Again it is abandoned and that is the only time the audience is ever so directly asked to think about the historical context the movie.
The moments of brilliance may make this one of those movies worthy of detailed examination in classrooms in the future, but as entertainment, or even just trying to remove the whitewashing filter in WWII movies, it fails. With its hyperactive short attention span, it just tries to put its finger in too many pies and then waters down what could have been a brutal conclusion with the other 1983 bookend, a couple scenes that are even more worthless than the opening.
Save your money on this one—it is simply too long for the theater. If you have a thing for war movies, wait for DVD when you can do it in shifts. Perhaps the oddest thing about the movie, though, is how it ended up on Disney’s plate. Miracle at St. Anna is under the Touchstone label but even there, Disney has been trying to keep the selection tilted more towards the family. This is a movie that more than earns its R-rating. In addition to the war violence you’d expect, there is also nudity (topless woman) and language that offend some even if presented in a realistic context. Do not let the cute 9-year-old from the commercials fool you into thinking it might be OK for your young children. Also, the smart decision was made and native languages are used where appropriate, so lengthy scenes are entirely in Italian or German with subtitles.
MIracle at St. Anna is a Touchstone Pictures release
- Wide release on Friday, September 26, 2008
- Directed by Spike Lee
- Screenplay by James McBride
- Starring: Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, Omar Benson Miller, Laz Alonso, Valentina Cervi, Matteo Sciabordi
- Rated R for strong war violence, language and some sexual content/nudity.
- Runtime: 164 minutes
- Alex’s Rating: 5 out of 10
