Do The Fight Thing | The cast of Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna is lost behind enemy lines and trapped in a muddled screenplay.
Directed by Spike Lee. Starring Derek Luke, Laz Alonso, Michael Ealy, Omar Benson Miller, Matteo Sciabordi. Now playing.
*
Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna is a disaster of a movie. Note that I did not say a movie about a disaster.
It could have been great. It could have been what the first few minutes promise the audience it would be: a murder mystery, the motivation for which rests deep in the forgotten history of the Second World War’s 92nd Infantry, an all-black outfit nicknamed the “Buffalo Soldier Division.” As a young reporter in 1983, Tom Boyle (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) digs into the open-and-shut case of a postal service worker going, ahem, “postal” on a customer, the real mystery becomes not whodunit, but why? However, Lee quickly abandons this intriguing Citizen Kane-esque storytelling device and forces us to wait nearly three hours before we get to see the intrepid journalist and the mild-mannered murderer again.
In between, we get sent back to 1944, where the 92nd is trying to take a river in northern Italy, on the other side of which Nazis have been dug in for months. When the troops ask for artillery support, their angry white commander figures they’re lying about their position and ends up bombing the shit out of his own platoon, reconnaissance be damned.
Amidst the chaos, four soldiers get stuck in Nazi-held territory and, in their wandering, they end up saving the life of an Italian boy, bringing him to a Tuscan village for medical attention. Holding position in the village, the four American soldiers meet up with a group of Italian partisans, including our present-day dead guy. Somewhere around the two-hour mark it finally becomes clear why Dead Guy deserves to be dead and the rest is just more killing, as if you haven’t gotten your fill of bursting squibs already.
There are very few miracles in the film, if any. Most of its running time is dedicated to watching a lot of people dying gruesomely — that’s time that should have been spent on developing the characters, especially the secondary ones. The bad guys, from the white commanders to the Nazi soldiers are one-dimensionally evil, utterly devoid of humanity. We cannot forget man’s ability to be brutal and cruel to his fellow man, but even more important to remember is that it was humans, not monsters, executing humans. The actors playing Nazi generals in Miracle at St. Anna, on the other hand, do what seem to be live re-enactments of Allied propaganda posters.
Miracle wants to bring to light the role black soldiers played in the Second World War. It wants to remind us of the atrocities of war, and their effects on the people who live through them. It wants to tell a human story and be a historical document. It wants to be so many things, but all it ends up being is a mess.
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