Movie No. 24: Miracle at St. Anna

Expectations are an interesting thing. Have them too high for a film and even a good movie may feel like a disappointment. When a movie gets blasted by critics the way Spike Lee's war film "Miracle at St. Anna" was, well, expectations tend to fall.

And perhaps that's a good thing. "Miracle at St. Anna" is by no means the masterpiece I was hoping for when I first heard about it, but it isn't the disaster some have proclaimed it to be either. It's a film with both powerful scenes and all-too-apparent flaws. In the end, however, the positives outweigh the negatives, even if not by much.

The film begins in the early '80s with an apparently random act of violence. A postal clerk pulls out a German lugar and shoots a customer buying stamps and an ancient Roman artifact is found stored at the bottom of his closet.

We then flashback to a group of black soldiers on patrol in Italy. A combination of German fire and a mistake by their racist commander leave four of the soldiers (played by Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, Laz Alonso and Omar Benson Miller) stranded behind enemy lines in an Italian town along with an Italian boy that the hulking Pvt. Train (Miller) saved from a collapsed barn.

They must take refuge with an Italian family, including a Fascist father who believes Mussolini's only mistake was joining with Hitler and his lovely daughter Valentina Cervi, who attracts the attention of Luke and Ealy's characters and is friends with the local resistance fighters.

From films such as "25th Hour" and "Inside Man," it is obvious that Lee is a talented storyteller. The usual question with his films is his activism. When that activism works in conjunction with his storytelling skills you get classic films such as "Do the Right Thing" and "Malcolm X." When they end up in competition, you get the second half of "Bamboozled," where Lee's hatred of his characters overwhelmed everything else. When the negative reviews started pouring in, especially given that Lee had been so outspoken about showing the contribution of black soldiers too often hidden in war films, I was afraid that this was the case again. Strangely, it was the other half of the equation that was weak here. When the movie failed, it failed solely because of its storytelling.

Part of the problem lies in the frame story. It should enrich the main narrative, add to our interest. Unfortunately it was so awkward in tone and ineffective at connecting emotionally that the film would have been better off if the entire thing had been axed. The battle scenes also seem to have been shot in such a way that they convey only death, and too often even minimize that. There is little power there, with the initial battle seeming to act as little more than a convenient way to have the four men separated in this town. It doesn't help that, especially during the battle scenes, the score by the usually wonderful Terence Blanchard seems to compete with the images more than complement them.

Between the duel bookends of the battle scenes and the framing story, however, we follow the soldiers, watch them interact, see their hopes and fears. It is here that the film, with an able assist from the four talented actors, feels most at home. It is the characters that hold our interest, give the film its meaning, and while even these scenes might never reach masterpiece-level, they are compelling enough to outweigh the film's problems, moving enough where I'm glad I watched.

C+