Miracle at St. Anna is a technically competent but ultimately pointless war flick from director Spike Lee that isn’t nearly as stirring or inspirational as it thinks it is or needs to be. Really, the only thing epic about it is its bloated 160-minute running time.
The story revolves around four members of the Buffalo Soldiers, black soldiers in the segregated 92nd Infantry Unit, who, in Italy in 1944, find themselves miles behind Nazi lines and trapped in a Tuscan village.
Lee gets in his digs at how miserable it probably was to be a black soldier in a white man’s army. Like when one soldier remarks how he feels freer in a foreign country than in his own, and also when the Germans employ the unusual tactic of taunting the black soldiers with the idea that their white commanders consider them expendable so that they’ll give up.
The film would actually have been more interesting had Lee focused on the race issue. But instead he jams in subplots about an AWOL German soldier, a black soldier looking after an Italian boy, a group of Italian villagers and a troupe of Italian partisans. It’s too much for Lee to juggle and as a result the soldiers themselves aren’t given much personality, though one of them does get lucky.
On the plus side, Lee treats us to numerous shots of the beautiful Tuscan countryside and the old buildings of the Italian village. Acting-wise, Derek Luke, as the unit’s leader, and Pierfrancesco Favino, as the leader of the Partisans, fare the best. And Lee includes a nice cross-cutting of the black soldiers, the German soldiers and the Italian villagers as they all pray.
But back to the negatives. Like the “miracle” of the title. Never figured out what it is. Maybe I missed it. And what was with the soldier carrying around the head of that 400-year-old statue? And where did he get it? Not to mention that Joseph Gordon-Levitt, affecting an over-the-top New Yawk accent, is wasted in his few scenes as a reporter in the modern-day scenes that bookend the film.
So, for me, the film wasn’t necessarily bad. It just didn’t have a point, aside from maybe trying to show that black soldiers were just as competent as the white ones. But too many people die for that to be the case. Oh well. At least you’ll cry at the end. It might be because the last scene truly moved you like Lee wanted it to, or maybe because you realized you just wasted 2 ½ hours of your life.
Action/Crime/Drama/Thriller/War
Rated R
DVD Release Date: 2/10/09