Un-lee-shed: Miracle at St. Anna

This is the fifth in my 2019 bi-monthly series Un-lee-shed, where I catch up with (most of) the Spike Lee movies I haven’t seen.

Spike Lee has made a bunch of duds in his career. Given what I’d heard about it at the time it was released in 2008, I was pretty sure Miracle at St. Anna would be one of them.

It’s really not. Although it veers toward that territory during its low moments, Lee does mostly right the ship. He doesn’t right it enough for me to actually recommend Miracle at St. Anna, which is too long and has too many “goofy moments,” for want of a better word. But really, it’s not that bad of a movie.

What’s more, it feels like a Spike Lee movie. It’s loaded with his familiar concerns and some trademark touches.

When I first heard about Miracle at St. Anna, I thought it was a strange milieu for Lee – you know, a war movie. Many directors seem to eventually want to try one, so it isn’t surprising that Lee also wanted to take his turn. I mean, he’s never a director who has limited himself to just a few genres. But I guess I just didn’t expect it, maybe either in terms of the scope or in terms of the subject matter.

But Lee is no stranger to historical epics, which is kind of what I consider Malcolm X to be. Ambition can take on multiple forms, and with Lee, it has. He has ambitions toward tackling thorny racial issues, but he’s also got ambitions about the canvas on which he paints. So really, Miracle at St. Anna is not such a strange choice.

And it’s fairly credibly mounted. The war scenes, which are actually relatively few, have the basic details right. Bodies fall in the direction they should. Explosions seem like explosions. Music plays forlornly, perhaps too forlornly. If I have technical concerns with the movie, they relate mostly to the editing choices, and some of the shots by Matthew Libatique, who has actually since become one of the most sought-after DPs (Black Swan, mother!, A Star is Born).

I guess what doesn’t really work about the movie is that it feels like a mish-mash. Oh, plus those moments that feel like they come out of left field, tonally, many of which involve actor Omar Benson Miller.

Lee bites off a little more than he can chew here, but that’s not unusual territory for Lee. He was accused of doing that in BlacKkKlansman, which was my second favorite movie of last year. Maybe it’s the way he chews it.

The story follows the four surviving soldiers of a misbegotten mission in which a cowardly white captain (Walton Goggins) sends in a black company basically as sitting ducks for a German ambush. Oh, this is World War II, in case you didn’t know, and the setting is rural Italy. These four make their way to an Italian village, picking up an injured and delusional young boy along the way. Those villagers also have a back story, as do some Germans we meet, as do a group of Italian “Partisans” who were anti-Mussolini.

The story has the strange effect of introducing some of these characters too late for them to seem like such an integral part of the story, and abandoning others too early. I forgot to mention there is also a present-day (early 1980s) frame story involving one of the surviving soldiers shooting a man point blank when he recognizes him as his one time enemy, during a random interaction at a window at the post office. This portion of the story features John Turturro, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Kerry Washington … who, combined, receive about four minutes of screen time. The story doesn’t miss them per se, since the flashback that takes up 93% of the running time is actually more interesting, but it just calls into question why Lee bothered to show us this frame story and cast it with actors we would have expected to see more of. Perhaps most problematically, there's an especially strange and pointless cameo by John Leguizamo that doesn't even have any corollary when the frame story wraps back around at the end. 

And then there are the weird episodes. Almost without explanation, Omar Benson Miller, playing the character Sam Train, breaks out into uncomfortable moments in which it almost seems like he is doing a parody of the type of minstrel show African American that was the subject of Lee’s film Bamboozled. At best it’s a distraction and a tough tonal shift to swallow; at worst it feels like it sets back the racial understanding the film is grappling with. The fact that these moments of outrageous behavior are few and far between kind of helps, but also kind of begs the question about why Lee let those scenes get away from him in the first place.

In all, though, this is a mostly credible war movie that has some affecting moments. There’s too much of it, for sure, but that’s not a problem that’s unique to Lee. And it’s not totally satisfying, but it’s not unsatisfying, either. I’m not sure if I’m being biased by the negative reviews of it to give it a mild thumbs down rather than a mild thumbs up, but my concerns with it are significant enough that I’m comfortable with that. Especially since I’ve decided I need to toughen up and not just give every mediocre movie a pass.

One complaint I definitely had about it is that I went through the whole movie and could not definitively determine what the miracle of the title was supposed to be. There are a couple things that might have qualified, but none of them seemed really miraculous, or if so, the miracle was not presented in enough of an “a-ha!” moment for it to really sink in. There’s some magical realism here, but it’s begging for more explication.

To end on a more positive note, I did enjoy seeing some elements that I considered to be trademark Lee. Two in particular, in fact, were later echoed in BlacKkKlansman. The first is a scene where the soldiers stop and look at some war propaganda posters pasted to a stone wall in one of these villages they pass through. We see them looking at the posters in disgust – head on, as if the posters occupied the space where we the audience are sitting – for quite some time before we see what they’re actually looking at. It turns out this propaganda features some racist caricatures of black people in the type of hurtful style that was, again, the focus of Bamboozled. But the technique itself reminded me of the moment in BKKK where John David Washington slowly approaches the vile caricatures that the klansmen had been using as target practice. It’s not until he reaches the targets that we see how awful they truly are.

Lee’s fondness for cross-cutting is also on display here. There’s a scene where we see soldiers from three different countries – America, Germany and Italy – all praying to the same God, despite the fact that all three are in opposition to each other in meaningful ways. It may be a rather obvious message that we as human beings are more the same than we are different, but I’m a sucker for the kind of technique he uses to dramatize that. I suppose it’s used differently here than the “White power! Black power!” moment in BKKK, but no less effectively.

I’ve ended up writing more about Miracle at St. Anna than I expected I’d have any reason to, which most certainly speaks well of it, whether I think it’s ultimately a success or not.

Okay! This series concludes in December with Chi-Raq.