THE outspoken Spike Lee, who can often be his own worst enemy, has virtually invited critics to compare his problematic World War II epic “Miracle at St. Anna” with Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers.”
While Lee’s intentions are noble – to portray the African-American soldiers he says were ignored in Eastwood’s film – the merits of his own, lumbering movie often get subverted by questionable artistic choices.
“St. Anna,” like the Eastwood movie and the far superior “Saving Private Ryan,” bookends its 1940 story with scenes taking place closer to the present day – in this case, the 1980s.
The differences are that Lee’s framing device – which ends with a head-scratching fantasy – doesn’t work. At. All.
It opens with an elderly postal worker, seen dismissing John Wayne in “The Longest Day,” killing an elderly Italian in cold blood at the post office where he works with a service revolver he conveniently carries.
That leaves detective John Turturro, reporter Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and the audience to ponder the mystery, which involves a looted head of a marble statue from Rome that was improbably lugged around by four heroic members of a black platoon 40 years earlier.
The four are survivors of a Nazi ambush (expertly staged by Lee) that a group of Buffalo Soldiers have been sent into by a cartoonishly racist white officer.
They end up in a small Italian village with very divided political sympathies, a sexy resistance fighter (Valentina Cervi) and a German deserter that the Allies very much want to question.
The shy Sgt. Stamps (Derek Luke) develops a crush on the woman, who is more aggressively wooed by the more suave Sgt. Cummings (Michael Ealy). The other two GIs are Cpl. Negron (Laz Alonso), a translator, and the simple-minded Pfc. Train (Omar Benson Miller), who becomes fixated on an Italian orphan who refers to him as a “chocolate giant” in an episode that can only be described as neo-realism filtered through the sensibilities of Roberto Benigni.
Sometimes Lee hits the nail on the head – there’s a wonderful party scene where the Italians embrace their liberators so warmly that the GIs observe they feel more at home here than in America.
Contrast that with a totally unsubtle flashback-within-a-flashback of the black soldiers being refused service at a redneck diner. Just in case we miss the point, the diner is serving Caucasian German prisoners of war.
And just in case we still don’t get the point, Lee ends the sequence with the actors staring directly into the camera – a j’accuse moment that takes the audience out of the movie altogether.
All of these narrative tics bloat the running time past the 21/2-hour mark. The sad thing is, there’s a perfectly fine, Sam Fulle-rish, 90-minute war movie on a worthy subject trapped somewhere in the self-indulgences of “Miracle at St. Anna.”
MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA
A losing battle.
In English and Italian with English subtitles. Running time: 160 minutes. Rated R (graphic war violence, profanity, sex, nudity). At the Lincoln Square, the Village East, the Battery Park City, others.