The first time I tried to watch the DVD for director Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna I fell asleep. Was I tired? Could it have been because I had already seen it? Second attempt — disc in, hit play, fell right to sleep; fell asleep so fast, actually, I can’t even remember the last scene I watched before it happened. The third attempt proved to be the winner, that is to say I made it all the way through. Unfortunately everything was coming back to me. Not only does this movie not really have a point, it is so long and self-important watching it was like listening to a dull collegiate professor lecturing on the intricacies of the Dewey Decimal System. This film has to be one of 2008’s biggest, most frustrating disappointments, and the DVD hammers that home with all the subtlety of a jackhammer.
Based on the acclaimed novel by James McBride (who also wrote the screenplay) this is arguably the worst film of Lee’s entire career. It is a poorly constructed picture that’s about as dour an exercise in tedium as you could imagine. Pity, because there is a good movie in here someplace just aching to be told. The fictional story centers on four members of the very real WWII Army regiment known as the Buffalo Soldiers. The film has a potent hook and a central mystery that’s immediately intriguing, but nothing comes of it.
Focusing on Staff Sergeant Aubrey Stamps (Derek Luke), Sergeant Bishop Cummings (Michael Ealy), Corporal Hector Negron (Laz Alonso) and Private First Class Sam Train (Omar Benson Miller) of the 92nd Infantry Division the story gets going when they find themselves trapped behind enemy lines, and alone in a small Italian town as they try to plan their next move. When they’re ordered to take prisoner a German soldier for interrogation, safety for both themselves and for the residents of the village suddenly becomes their primary concern, while a mysterious boy named Angelo (Matteo Sciabordi) potentially holds the key that can lead to their salvation.
At least, that’s the story I think Lee is trying to tell. It’s really hard to know, since the movie jumps forwards and backwards through time like it’s a shell-shocked homage to Back to the Future and not an African American Guns of Navarone. Lee’s attempts to show the racial prejudices of the day aren’t exactly subtle, and while some of them pack a definite wallop (a set piece inside a Southern ice cream parlor in particular) most of them fall flat.
This standard definition DVD release of Miracle at St. Anna is fine, more or less, although there are no special features whatsoever other than a bunch of trailers (for titles ranging from the upcoming Confessions of a Shopaholic to the Kevin Costner bomb Swing Vote)., which only leaves the movie itself to talk about, and based on what I’ve already written my thoughts on that front aren’t exactly a mystery.
The bottom line is that this plays like a slideshow of greatest war movie hits from Saving Private Ryan to The Longest Day, and this wouldn’t be so bad if not for the pointless nature of it all. McBride’s screenplay builds to a coda straight out of Contact while the climax in the village itself goes absolutely nowhere. Blood flows, shots are fired and people go out of their ways to be heroes but to what end? What is the miracle? Who is meant to be saved and why should we care? None of these questions are answered, not a single one, and if all Lee was interested in saying was black soldiers got the shaft from the white officers in command during WWII I can’t help but think he could have said it better than this.
