Post by BIGFANBOY on Sept 26, 2008 5:19:34 GMT -5
MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA
Review by Gary Dean Murray
September has always been a time of early Oscar hopeful releases. This has been the part of the year where studios send out the long shots, flicks that have a pedigree but lack that certain something that makes Oscar gold. By the time the actual awards are announced, these films are usually being prepped for DVD release. Such is the newest Spike Lee Joint Miracle at St. Anna.
The film opens in the middle of things. An elderly gentleman is watching a John Wayne war movie and muttering that ‘we fought for this country too’. The next day the gentleman is at his job at the post office counter. An elderly Italian man steps up to the window and our man kills him with a very old German pistol. Now a detective (John Turturro) and a cub reporter are at the scene trying to figure out the motivation. The reporter goes with two other detectives to the perp’s home. In a closet they find a statue head. The mystery thickens.
It seems that the statue head is a missing piece from an Italian bridge and is valued in the millions. This makes international headlines. This gets back to Italy where a man is so shocked he drops his coffee. Add mystery-thickening agent.
But the reporter finally gets to talk to the shooter and here comes the major flashback. The Buffalo Soldiers were a group of black servicemen in WWII. Before then, most blacks in the service were cooks or in service positions, never on the front lines. Now our film opens with a group of these brave men going across a field where German propaganda is being broadcast overhead. They are second class citizens in their own country, fighting a white man’s war. After a Saving Private Ryan-esque cinematic battle scene, four soldiers are caught deep behind enemy lines. PFC Sam Train (Omar Benson Miller) is our gentle giant, a Lemmy style simpleton full of superstitions and religious fears. He finds and rescues an Italian boy who thinks the black man is a chocolate giant. The four men have to hide out in an Italian village, waiting to be rescued by the rest of the troops.
The rest of the plot is the German troops looking for a deserter who is so wanted by the higher command that a commander on the ground assumes that the young man must have committed a horrendous crime. The third part of this plot involves a group of freedom fighters in the Italian hills that may or may not be the men they propose to be.
As these GI live with the locals they find that the Italians accept them more than the white people in their own country. The four men are more stereotypes than actual human beings with cinematic shorthand taking the place over thought out characters. They are the best and the worst of us, each an archetype than a drawn out dimensional human being.
Spike Lee has thrown everything against the cinematic wall just to see what would stick. Sometimes it works but in this instance there is just too much going on. A simpler story would have been a boon to the actual tale. Some of the individual scenes are nice and the work is a beautifully detailed work. At almost three hours, this little film is in need of a tight editor. There are so many different threads that weave this cinematic cloth
There is a great story to be told about the Buffalo Soldiers but Miracle at St Anna isn’t it. While an entertaining flick, it is not a great film. Call it more of a missed opportunity than a solid work of art.
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