A company of Buffalo soldiers advance on German lines across a river. The Germans' first line of defense is not formed by bunkers, bullets or explosives, but rather something far more dangerous -- words. A megaphone blares propaganda spoken by a woman in a sultry, German croon.
Spike Lee drives his verbal punch forcefully in "Miracle at St. Anna" (2008), grafting his signature examinations of race on to World War II battlefields.
The megaphone rallies the black soldiers' awareness, reminding them of their status as second-class Americans, of the malicious racism and of the blatant social inequality they experience at home and abroad.
Lee presents legitimate social criticism of American society through the lens of an indisputably evil fascist regime.
Scenes such as this one perturb and probe at the racial hypocrisy at the heart of World War II with startling effectiveness. Lee conveys his message with the aesthetic sensibility of a cinematographic master.
Had this scene been exemplary of the entirety of Spike Lee's newest offering, "Miracle" would have merited an Oscar nomination. Unfortunately, Lee fails to deliver the spectacular success his premise leads us to expect, and over the course of three hours its less-original elements bring the film down.
Spike Lee panders to the his audience's sentimentality with this chilling scene only to regurgitate tired cliches from that point on.
The particularly offensive finale bastardizes all the standard, feel-good Hollywood endings one can imagine and compacts them into a single scene.
Though it depends on a loaded arsenal of war-film genre moments, "Miracle" resists categorization as a film about war. The battles serve only as a landscape on which Lee scrutinizes social constructs and race.
Anyone familiar with Spike Lee's repertoire would hardly be surprised by such a focus, but there is something patently unusual about the film's style. Sundered bodies and copious gore color the first half hour of the film only to give way to a strange and child-like odyssey.
"Miracle at St. Anna begins with a bizarre murder in the 1980s that leads in to the bulk of the film, a World War II flashback -- a feature-length film on its own. The murder only acts as a cursory narrative element, a distraction from the actual film. In this flashback, Spike Lee follows four black soldiers who find themselves cut off from the rest of the Allied forces. All four protagonist roles are superbly handled by Berek Luke, Michael Ealy, Laz Alonso and Omar Benson Miller.
At first, the brutal chaos of war leaves the audience in the familiar war-movie mind set, but Spike Lee suddenly changes the tone. The soldiers come upon a cottage, with a haystack that seems to move on its own. They encounter a small Italian boy, the aptly named Angelo (played by Matteo Sciabordi) and his imaginative friend.
Considering the immense popularity of "Pan's Labyrinth" (2006), it is difficult not to see its influence in Lee's setup. But Spike Lee takes this juxtaposition of childhood innocence and brutal war in a different direction.
In "Miracle" the real and imagined are one and the same. Having never seen a black man before, the Italian boy thinks that the burly soldier who rescues him is made of chocolate. Lee contrasts the absurdity of such racial naivete with actual malicious racism later on.
The bulk of the film takes place in a small Italian town and focuses on the social dynamic between the Italians and the four Buffalo soldiers. Their interactions are engaging mostly through the sheer strength of the cast and the lusty cinematography.
It is a shame that such an otherwise beautifully complex film eventually fumbles so badly that it completely distracts the viewer from the intriguing first half. To Spike Lee's credit, though, the cliches only become obvious in retrospect.
Soldiers fighting over a civilian woman, terribly contrived arguments over the legitimacy of a "white man's war" and dialogue from a Filmmaking 101 handbook begin to seriously challenge the viewer's suspension of disbelief.
The melodrama begins to coalesce into an increasingly unbelievable mess of a movie. This could all be overlooked if not for the abysmal D-movie-quality ending.
The finale is so predictable that even a child could predict each line of dialogue. I would recommend seeing this film but leaving half an hour early. You will appreciate the film far more than those poor unwitting viewers who stick around until the credits.