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After criticizing director Clint Eastwood for the lack of African-American soldiers in his recent World War II dramas, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima, Spike Lee decided to make his own World War II drama. But while Miracle at St. Anna does put WWII’s Buffalo Soldiers in the spotlight, it ends up making a muddled mess of just about everything else.
Based on the novel by James McBride, Miracle at St. Anna tells the story of four soldiers from the 92nd Infantry Division who find themselves separated from the rest of their regiment somewhere in Tuscany.
After a battle with the Germans, Private Sam Train (Omar Benson Miller) rescues an injured Italian boy (Matteo Sciabordi). Joined by three of his fellow soldiers, Train seeks help for the boy in a mountainside village. Slowly, with the help of Italian-speaking Corporal Hector Negron (Laz Alonso), they start to piece together the boy’s story—and they learn of the horrors he’s survived.
But there’s a whole lot more to it than that; this is, after all, a 160-minute movie. So there’s also a part with some barking German soldiers (which reminded me of the old Hogan’s Heroes reruns that my dad used to watch). There’s something about a group of Italian soldiers who are hiding in the woods (and their Nazi prisoner, whom the Americans try to steal and bring back to their camp). And there’s something else involving an ancient Italian artifact. But all those extra subplots make Miracle at St. Anna such a confounding and disconnected mess that I still haven’t figured out what it’s supposed to be about.
It’s such a mess, in fact, that I don’t even know where to begin discussing it. Should I start with the unintentionally goofy parts or the excruciatingly melodramatic parts? Should I talk about the ridiculous characters (like Michael Ealy’s Bishop, who spends the whole movie chasing tail) or the laughably cliché battle scenes? Or maybe I should just discuss the fact that it’s all so random and disjointed that it’s hard to follow—and it’s even harder to care about any of it.
And then there are the subtitles. I enjoy foreign movies—and, consequently, I have no objection to subtitles. I also understand that there are four different languages spoken in Miracle at St. Anna, which means that subtitles are necessary. But it perplexes me that American director Lee would create an American movie that sometimes includes two men yelling at each other at the same time in a non-English language—requiring subtitles that move by at an impossible-to-read speed on both sides of the screen. It makes me wonder: does Lee not care about his audience…or does he just not want them to understand what’s going on?
Whatever the case, I spent almost the entire two hours and forty minutes feeling completely bewildered (not to mention slightly perturbed). While I understood the gist of story, I also understood that, had author/screenwriter McBride dumped the unnecessary subplots and focused more on the main story, it could have been a 90-minute movie (and it could have made a whole lot more sense). Instead, it’s a painfully long movie that’s sometimes heavy-handed, sometimes absurd, and almost always puzzling.
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