‘Miracle at St. Anna’ | 2 stars
Miracle at St. Anna” paints on a big canvas. Too big a canvas, as it turns out.
The coupling of Spike Lee, arguably still the greatest African-American director, with a World War II yarn about the Buffalo Soldiers of the 92nd Infantry ought to be a match made in heaven.
How, then, to account for this lumbering snooze — narratively graceless, frequently heavy-handed and obscenely overlong?
The film begins in 1983 NYC, where a postal clerk for no apparent reason shoots one of his customers point-blank. A young reporter (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is with the police as they search the accused man’s apartment — finding lots of WWII memorabilia and a marble head that once decorated a Florentine bridge blown up by the Germans.
The film than takes us back to 1944 Tuscany, where four black GIs find themselves trapped behind German lines.
They are Sgt. Stamps (Derek Luke), Bishop (Michael Ealy), Hector (Laz Alonso) and the hulking, rather dim Train (Omar Benson Miller).
When we first see Train he has dangling from his belt the marble head we saw earlier … it’s his good luck charm. And it seems to work, since it brings back to life an 8-year-old boy, Angelo (Matteo Sciabordi), who has been injured in a German bombardment.
The huge Train and the kid are instant soul mates. They’re both visionary innocents. Train is fiercely superstitious, and Angelo claims to have an invisible friend.
The Americans and their young charge take shelter in a town. There is, of course, a beautiful woman (Valentina Cervi). The principled Stamps admires her platonically; the opportunistic, cynical Bishop, on the other hand, has more carnal ideas.
They also meet up with a legendary partisan leader (Pierfrancesco Favino) who’s starting to come a bit unraveled by all the ugliness he has seen, and his cohort (Sergio Albelli).
Meanwhile the Germans are planning an attack, and we begin to understand how young Angelo came to be wandering the forests and fields by himself … it has everything to do with the German massacre of his village of St. Anna.
In adapting his own novel for the screen, James McBride makes just about all the mistakes a first-time screenwriter can make. The film is unfocused, full of digressions, flashbacks, inexplicable behavior and undeveloped characters (if you blink you’ll miss the cruise-bys of John Turturro, Kerry Washington, John Leguizamo, D.B. Sweeney and other familiar faces).
About every 20 minutes the film grinds to a halt so that the characters can present their talking points about racism, the evils of war, God and the hereafter, the brotherhood of man, etc. etc. etc. There’s even a big confrontation between a “good” German officer and his brutal superior (just so we know that not all Germans are bad).
There’s no question that black GIs put up with plenty of racist grief. But these incidents are depicted with a crude clumsiness that’s more agitprop than drama.
Instead of elevating these big issues, “Miracle at St. Anna” renders them clunky and uncompelling (an insistent musical score doesn’t help any).
At least it’s a good-looking movie, with fine cinematography and production design.
But Lee’s heart isn’t in this one … and it shows.
‘MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA’
★★
Director: Spike Lee
Cast: Derek Luke, Omar Benson Miller, Michael Ealy, Laz Alonso
Rated: R for strong war violence, language and some sexual content/nudity; some dialogue with subtitles
Running time: 2:37
FACT AND FICTION
“Miracle at St. Anna” is based on James McBride’s 2003 novel. But it’s set against true events:
•Toward the end of World War II, the Axis powers were defending the so-called Gothic Line through the Apennine Mountains. On Aug. 12, 1944, the Nazis massacred 560 Italian civilians in the Tuscan village of St. Anna di Stazzema as a retaliation against Italian partisans fighting the fascists.
•The 92nd Infantry Division, consisting of 15,000 African- American men — Buffalo Soldiers — fought in Italy from August 1944 to November 1945. McBride interviewed several of the surviving soldiers.
| Sharon Hoffmann, The Star
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