PDA

View Full Version : Casualty of war



thedrifter
09-26-08, 06:34 AM
Posted on Fri, Sep. 26, 2008
Casualty of war
Spike Lee's 'Miracle' doesn't deliver the drama

By GARY THOMPSON
Philadelphia Daily News

thompsg@phillynews.com 215-854-5992
True to form, the new Spike Lee movie was preceeded by the new Spike Lee dustup.

A few months ago, he called out Clint Eastwood for leaving black Marines out of "Flags of Our Fathers." Then he debuted "Miracle at St. Anna" at the Toronto Film Festival, where he scolded Hollywood for its sorry record in dramatizing the contributions of black soldiers in World War II.

Of course, this raised expectations that Lee would use his new World War II movie to help right these wrongs. The movie's epic size - a full 155 minutes - seemed in itself an act of redress, and the opening scenes promise more.

In a prologue, an elderly black veteran watches John Wayne in "The Longest Day" and says, bitterly, that black soldiers sacrificed for their country, too.

We soon flash back to Italy in late 1944, and watch a unit of the 92nd Infantry, the famed Buffalo Soldiers, mount a bloody attack on a German position. It's a slaughter, abetted by bigoted white officers who make poor decisions based on a low opinion of their own infantrymen.

This echoes "Saving Private Ryan" - the idea of a wraparound structure set hard against a bloody opening combat sequence - and we settle in to enjoy a big, sprawling wartime canvas.

As the movie crawls on, though, these expectations deflate, and you begin to sense that "Miracle at St. Anna," adapted from a James McBride novel, is not a story that complements Lee's ambitions.

The book is a comparatively intimate account of four soldiers cut off from their outfit and wandering the Italian countryside. It's a lost-patrol narrative that has much more in common with, say, "A Midnight Clear" than a big wartime history lesson.

Its most distinctive trait is a sort of magical realism that finds expression in the character of Pvt. Train (Omar Benson Miller), a strapping, provincial, superstitious soldier who lugs around an artifact he believes makes him invisible, and soon finds another lucky charm - a wounded, traumatized Italian boy he rescues from a bombed-out farmhouse.

The boy has been shocked to the point of delusion by an atrocity; he is the lone survivor and eyewitness. As the four soldiers hide out in an Italian village far behind German lines, the child becomes the key in the treacherous balance between the GIs, their Italian hosts (some Fascist, some not) and Italian partisans whose ranks include a traitor known to the terrified boy.

This should be a tense situation, but a strange slackness takes hold as Lee digresses into squad dynamics - mainly the tension between a swaggering private (Michael Ealy) and the cautious soldier (Derek Luke) whom he regards as an Uncle Tom.

Nobody seems to care very much that the countryside is, or should be, full of Nazis with guns. There is no sense of wartime danger here. We're told that the unit is surrounded, but we don't feel it, and a few of the Germans we do meet seem to have wandered in from "Hogan's Heroes," making blustery threats about the Russian front.

Luke's squad leader doesn't bother to patrol, or post a lookout, and the passing of time is uncertain. Compare this to the final 20 minutes of "Ryan," and its account of cut-off GIs trying to survive in a tiny village, and you feel the difference.

"Miracle at St. Anna" never finds a unifying tone (Terence Blanchard's score isn't the right glue) and humor mixes awkwardly with horror. Lee seems to want to compete with the extreme naturalism of recent World War II movies, when the surrealism of last year's "Atonement" might have suited the story a little better.

The movie's best feature is the bond between Train and his supernatural mascot. It gives the movie needed emotion, and marks Miller (he reminds you of a young Forest Whitaker) as an actor to watch - he's also very good in the upcoming football bio "The Express." *

Produced by Spike Lee, Luigi Musini and Robert Cicutto, directed by Spike Lee, written by James McBride, music by Terence Blanchard, distributed by Touchstone Pictures.

Ellie