S P L I N T E R E D | L I G H T

Isn’t it nice to see gutsy, creative film-making? I will be the first to admit that it doesn’t necessarily work here, but man is it a pleasure to watch. Spike Lee’s newest film, Miracle at St. Anna, is choppy, a little self-conscious, and quite over extended, but moving and bold nonetheless.

The film begins with several gripping scenes. Black war veteran, Hector Negron (Las Alonso) watches John Wayne in a emotional scene from The Longest Day. “We fought that war too,” Negron mutters. Then we cut to him at work. He is a silent, obviously scarred postal worker. Instead of selling a customer stamps, a shocking even occurs. These scenes were very effective despite the lack of reference points. They created a myriad of questions and emotional connections that immediately put me in the story to find the answers. But then the plot gets really loose and I didn’t know where we were going for the next 45 minutes.

Turns out Hector Negron has a priceless piece of Italian statuary stuffed in a Macy’s bag in his closet. There is a man in Italy who drops his coffee cup when he sees the newspaper headline. There is a reporter who tells silent Hector a bunch of stuff he already knows so that we movie-goers can get up to speed. Hector’s only response is that he knows who the ‘sleeping man’ is . . . intriguing. Then we cut to Italy 1944 as the 92nd infantry division, nicknamed ‘Buffalo Soldiers,’ get mowed down by a Nazi garrison who have been blasting über-creepy anti-racist propaganda at them.

Only four soldiers survive. Hector Negron is one, he is a Puerto Rican who can speak Spanish as well as some Italian. Another soldier named Train (Omar Benson Miller), who reminds me of George from Of Mice and Men, rescues an Italian boy who seems to have a connection to the spiritual world. They are driven deep behind enemy lines to an occupied Italian village, where stuck between Nazis and racist superior officers, these four black soldiers are taken in by Italians and begin to feel they are being treated like human beings for the first time.

It is also where I begin to feel like way too much is going on in this film. Themes tackled include, racism, death, war, politics, innocence, propaganda, spirituality, the miraculous, love, and I think a little chaos theory. This is not to say that a masterpiece couldn’t weave all those together. Where Miracle at St. Anna goes wrong is to so overtly switch gears between them. This scene, it says, is about racism–jump cut–now this one is about miracles. This is what I mean when I say the film is self-conscious – it knows that it is addressing particular issues in particular monologues. The audience can tell too, and it makes the themes a little thin when you can see straight through them like that.

The plot also seems stretched a little thin. There is a developing relationship between Train and the small boy he has saved, which brings in some elaborate and brilliant back-story. There is also a rivalry between two other soldiers for the affection of a beautiful Italian girl. Then there are the actual events of the war with their mission objectives and racist superiors. Then there is a flashback sequence of racism in the deep South. Then there are Italian guerillas who show up to complicate all the stories. Then there is the meta-story we have almost forgotten about, the one with the elderly Hector, the statue, and the man in Italy.

In the final scene several characters are presented in a type of heaven. It is beautiful and cathartic. An angelic man says some revelatory things and I have a suspicion that if I watched the film over with them in mind more would gel than did the first time, but overall Lee has a hard time bringing all the themes, symbols, and metaphors together in a satisfying way. For example, Hector Negron’s Italian artifact turns out to be the lost head of a statue called the Primavera, which means ‘spring.’ Train carries this statue with him the entire film, believing it gives him magical powers. Yet what seems like such a powerful symbol early on – does it represent the seed of hope lying dormant through a winter of war and racism? – becomes more of a MacGuffin by the end. This happens again with the ‘sleeping man’ line – the explanation is not satisfying given the prominence of the original statement.

Miracle at St. Anna was originally a novel by James McBride who also wrote the screenplay. I do not know if the book seems as fragmented as the film does, but my guess is it doesn’t. Prose fiction can do almost anything. Film is a medium that needs to know its limits. The book may fluidly tell these intertwining stories but the film would benefit from a much more focused vision. Too many scenes take us away from the main action to tell us minor explanatory things. In one scene we see two German officers arguing simply to paint one sympathetically for a split-second appearance near the end. While I was watching the argument I was totally without reference points, and the scene near the end would have played fine without it. An even more painful example of this is the cameo with John Leguizamo.

Instances of this film were exquisite. It is very beautiful and insightful in its photography, pushing you to see things in revelatory ways. The acting was stellar, especially from the four black leads, who I have to admit I was unfamiliar with before. Battle sequences were viscerally staged. There are probably a half-dozen scenes that could move someone to tears – they are that overwhelming. All these things make the film worth seeing, and worth thinking about.

If this film were more focused and tightly wound it could be genius. Although some of the scenes seem irrelevant or misplaced, Roger Ebert helpfully notes in his review that it is important to remember that Lee no doubt had to fight for their relevance and placement. Even if you are Spike Lee, studio heads fight you for every minute of run time. They want it less obtuse and under 2 hours. Trim off everything superfluous, turn it into an easy to swallow, sentimental, Hollywood war movie please. The fact that Miracle at St. Anna isn’t that movie tells us Lee likely fought to make creative decisions. It is a pity they don’t seem to have been better ones. Each scene is powerful but the totality lacks the impact one would expect from so much energetic film making. So while I cannot enjoy the film wholly, I can applaud and enjoy the audacity of the thing.