Early
in his career, Spike Lee made movies so crammed with ideas—some
endearingly personal, some bracingly ideological, some painfully
banal—that watching them could be as excruciating as it was exciting. In
recent years, he's shown more restraint, and in the '00s, he's made three films
(25th Hour, Inside Man, and When The Levees Broke) as strong as any the decade has produced. But Lee
takes a giant step backward with Miracle At St. Anna, a socially conscious World War II movie that
telegraphs its leadenness in its first 10 minutes, and departs two and a half
hours later, leaving behind only two or three memorable scenes. (Even the worst
Spike Lee joints usually offer more than that.) Miracle is a botch of the first order, the kind of
ham-fisted agitprop that Lee would've made in the late '80s if he'd had the
budget for it—though it still would have been more forgivably
freewheeling.
Miracle
At St. Anna opens with a black
postal worker shooting and killing a customer at his window. Attempts to
unravel why the man flipped out lead to the recovery of a rare fragment of
Italian statuary, and a story that stretches back to 1944, when the U.S. was
deploying the African-American "Buffalo Soldiers" to serve as bait for the
Nazis in Italy. In the story, one platoon advances farther than their superiors
expected, and gets involved in a standoff between the local fascists, partisan
rebels, and the Nazis. While plotting out their next move, the soldiers reflect
on why they're fighting on behalf of a country that shuns them.
In the abstract, this sounds like a fine idea for a movie.
But the abstract doesn't contain Terence Blanchard's relentless, mournful
martial score, or the routine-to-the-point-of-cliché battle scenes, or the
broad comic relief that borders on shuck-and-jive. Miracle At St. Anna stabilizes after an outright awful
first hour, and becomes merely a middling war movie with a heightened social
consciousness. And the movie reaches something like an epiphany during one
sublime scene where the American troops look at Axis propaganda posters that
depict the U.S. as a nation of mongrels. (At its noblest, Lee's film is trying
to counteract the Hollywood propaganda that has written African-Americans out
of the WWII narrative.) But for most of its punishingly long running time, Miracle plays like School Daze transplanted to the European front,
with the token militant, the token uplift-the-race type, and the token buffoon
all marching inexorably toward Checkpoint Irony.