Miracle at St. Anna

Directed by Spike Lee

After criticizing Academy cuddle-buddy Clint Eastwood for excluding black actors from his two-part WWII saga last year, Spike Lee has mounted a revisionist war movie (adapted from a James McBride novel) to rectify the omission of race from American war movie discourse.

Whatever Miracle at St. Anna was intended to be – suppressed history revealed, a studio-era trench ensemble throwback, a war movie patchwork borrowing heavily from the kid-in-war subgenre – it fails rather spectacularly. Having proved himself capable of a sweeping politicized epic (four-hour Katrina doc When the Levees Broke) and excellent genre revision (heist flick Inside Man), Lee’s attempt to do both simultaneously disappoints. For a director whose most problematic films still fascinate, St. Anna is uncharacteristically flat. At its core are predictable war-time interactions between a host of Tuscan villagers, four stranded African American soldiers and their super-cute eight year-old attaché Angelo. The alliance of politically and racially marginalized groups should have been St. Anna’s (and Spike’s) salvation, but instead few characters transcend Lee’s usual set of archetypes, and what seems intended as a departure from war movie formulas ends up indulging them. Most puzzling is the semi-supernatural friendship (remember how much Lee loves magical connections?) between Angelo and Omar Benson Miller’s gentle giant Train (think Vin Diesel’s Iron Giant plus Michael Clarke Duncan in The Green Mile).

It’s as if, unsure whether to adhere to his super-stylized “Spike Lee Aesthetic” or go in for crispy war epic realism, Lee dances between the two and trips himself up in the end. By the time he drops everything for a finale on a heavenly Bahamas beach, it’s clear that even a miracle can’t save St. Anna from military movie mediocrity.

A similar version of this review appears in The L Magazine, and can be read here.