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Miracle at St. Anna
How would it feel to be asked to fight and die for a country that treated you as a second-class citizen? “Miracle at St. Anna” expresses this to a point as it tells the story of the U.S. Army’s all-black 92nd Infantry Division in conflict with the enemy and their own emotions in Italy during World War II. Spike Lee’s ambitious epic also touches on how war affects the civilian population, features a surrogate father-son storyline, and hints at vague themes of the supernatural. There are so many characters with varying degrees of development -- and we’re asked to give each an equal amount of attention -- that “Miracle at St. Anna” loses itself a little along the way, but it’s otherwise a good story. The movie opens in the early 1980s. Hector Negron, a U.S. Post Office clerk, recognizes a man at his window one day and pops a cap in him. Immediately arrested, Negron refuses to talk to anyone, until he delivers a cryptic line to a young newspaper reporter. The film flashes back to 1944 Italy, as Negron and his fellow Buffalo Soldiers attempt to beat back a German battalion to cross an important river. This leads to a powerful scene as “Axis Sally” blasts propaganda to the all-black division from across the river. Eventually Negron and three of his fellow soldiers make it across the river, rescue a young Italian boy, and head to a remote Italian village, where PFC Train (Omar Benson Miller) forms a close bond with the boy, Angelo. The troops find shelter with a family, who are also protecting a couple of Italian partisans. After a German soldier is captured, conflict nearly erupts between them and the American troops; meanwhile, the boy Angelo begins to communicate with Train, and a flashback reveals how he escaped the Sant’Anna massacre of August, 1944. It’s in this scene and the expose of a traitor in the group’s midst that Spike Lee deviates from history for dramatic purposes. After reading the story behind the real Sant’Anna massacre, I felt Spike Lee has not done injustice to the memory of those dead. In the film, the Nazi massacre is carried out for the purposes of rooting out partisans. Whether or not there was a motivation behind the massacre is beside the point. It was still a horrible war crime, committed in cold blood, and the film depicts this in chilling detail. The film wraps up quickly, with a spectacular battle between German troops and American reinforcements that have arrived in the village. Hector Negron’s motivations for shooting the man at his post office window are explained to the audience. He goes to trial, but a Deus Ex Machina takes him away from court and off to an island where he’s reunited with an old friend, presumably to while away his days on the sandy beaches. It’s a rather trite and simple ending for such a long and complicated picture. Speaking of complicated, there’s another unbelievable flashback when we see our four main characters back at home, dealing with a racist café owner. They respond to him by ordering slushies at gunpoint, a cathartic scene for the audience, but something that I’m sure would have gotten back to their superiors, and landed them in serious trouble. I wish Lee would have simplified “Miracle at St. Anna” a bit. By throwing in too many unnecessary characters and scenes, Lee makes you work a bit too hard for what should be a straightforward picture. And Terence Blanchard, whose work I normally admire, has written much too overt and bombastic a score to fit a picture that’s already full of powerful scenes that don’t need such punctuation. One final note about the DVD edition of the film. I was disappointed that the standard definition DVD of “Miracle at St. Anna” is devoid of any special features. The Blu-Ray edition of the film includes deleted scenes, a discussion with Spike Lee and WWII veterans, and a history of the Buffalo Soldiers. None of these are included on the standard DVD, though they easily could have been. 3/30/09 Back to the main Cinema Tuesdays Reviews page More about the Cinema Tuesdays series  |
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