Review of Miracle at St. Anna

"Miracle at St. Anna" is an ambitious film built around a simple, but largely ignored truth. Director Spike Lee, determined to bring to the screen a story about the Blacks who fought in World War II, ends up doing that and much more, with mixed results.

The story is largely fiction, but it is built around actual events. Yes, the all-Black 92^nd Infantry Division (known as the Buffalo Soldiers) did fight in the Italian campaign of the war. Yes, Black soldiers were confronted with the painful paradox that, in many ways, they were more welcome abroad than they were in their own homeland. And yes, the Germans did massacre over 500 women, children and elderly civilians in front of the church at St. Anna (the film reenacts this horror at the very site where it actually occurred). From these facts Lee and screenwriter James McBride (the author of the novel of the same name) spin a mystical fable that touches on the common war themes of bravery, loyalty, humanity, and courage.

The major plot line is the story of four infantrymen who are trapped behind enemy lines after a bloody battle with the Germans. One of the soldiers, a dimwitted gentle giant (Private Sam Train, played by Omar Benson Miller), rescues a small Italian boy from certain death, and they all take refuge in a Tuscan village. Holed up in the home of Renata (Valentina Cervi) and her family, the soldiers try to figure out how to reconnect with their fellow troops before the Germans find them.

If this had been the sole premise of the film, it would have been a tight, focused, two-hour war story. Instead, Lee adds in several other threads - a band of Italian rebels called Partisans, a German officer under orders to capture an AWOL German soldier, and the growing bond between Train and the boy, Alonzo - that do not converge until the final scenes. The entire World War II back story is then wrapped around a modern-day murder in which a postal worker shoots a customer at his window with a German luger.

The result of this layering is a somewhat muddled film with unclear intent. As the viewer tries to figure out how the story lines connect, Lee inserts several info-dumping scenes in which the actors spout platitudes about race, war, politics and religion. Train is prone to pious, mystical rambling, Renata and her father debate the pros and cons of Fascism, and the idealistic Sargent Stamps (Derek Luke) and cynical Bishop (Michael Ealy) butt heads throughout, drilling home the oft-heard point that there are varying perspectives and ideologies within the Black community (see just about any other Spike Lee joint for reference).

These types of grandiloquent speeches are common to Spike Lee's films and a staple of war movies. But instead of slowing the film down, these scenes provide some relief from the unbearably thick tension, which is captured in Terrance Blanchard's foreboding score. The music is one of the film's highlights, along with strong, convincing performances by the ensemble cast. But the true miracle of the film (both literally and figuratively) is that Lee manages to humanize the Germans, a rare feat for any World War II movie. In small but pivotal glimpses, we see that not all of the "goose steppers" are fully in line with their brutal directives. On the downside, "Miracle at St. Anna" is sprawling, overly ambitious, and somewhat convoluted. Nonetheless, in bringing together races, cultures, nationalities, and generations, Lee has delivered one of his finest, richest and most complex films.