Miracle at St. Anna wants with all its impressive might to be more than just a war movie. But director Spike Lee bites off far more than he can possibly chew and ends up choking on his overindulgence. Part murder mystery, part war epic, part political polemic, part sentimental melodrama, this episodic film is a cinematic jack of all trades, but master of none. Despite flashes of extraordinary genius, Miracle at St. Anna is little more than a cartoon masquerading as a mature movie.

Miracle at St. Anna opens in 1983 when a black post office teller uses a German Luger to gun down an Italian immigrant at his window. As police officers and reporters go nosing around the shooter’s Harlem apartment for any sort of motive, they find a priceless marble head from a bridge in Florence, destroyed decades earlier by the Nazis. The statuary is our portal into the past. Flashing back in time, we find ourselves slogging our way through Tuscany with the all-black 92nd “Buffalo Soldier” Infantry Division.

Four soldiers from the 92nd are trapped behind enemy lines — the stalwart, no-nonsense Staff Sergeant Aubrey Stamps (Derek Luke); the charismatic, sardonic Sergeant Bishop Cummings (Michael Ealy); Private Sam Train (Omar Benson Miller), “the biggest negro you’ve ever seen;” and Corporal Hector Negron (Laz Alonso), a level-headed radio operator and the future post office teller. Trying to backtrack to the Allied lines, the four pick up the most unlikely of good luck charms — an injured Italian boy (the adorable Matteo Sciabordi) named Angelo who immediately takes to Train, calling him his “Chocolate Giant.”

The soldiers and their unlikely mascot take refuge in a hillside Tuscan village filled with wary if welcoming townspeople, including the beautiful Renata (Valentina Cervi), whom Stamps admires from afar and Cummings circles predatorily. As the men link up with local partisan fighters — one of whom is not what he seems — they formulate a plan to escape the Nazis who are closing in on all sides.

Lee’s intentions with Miracle at St. Anna are hardly subtle. The opening seconds of the film contain scenes of John Wayne swaggering his way through the World War II epic, The Longest Day. It’s as if Lee is saying that he made his film to right past wrongs, to reclaim whitewashed history and to challenge past Hollywood interpretations. It’s an honorable effort at a revisionist history, finally paying tribute to the gallant African American soldiers who fought in World War II but received little to no credit.

During its best moments, St. Anna examines the sorts of cultural collisions that compel people to face their prejudices and forge relationships only the pressures of war can produce. Characters learn to overcome barriers, be they cultural, linguistic or even sexual. When Axis Sally, the German equivalent of Tokyo Rose, broadcasts messages promising food (fried chicken and collard greens, of course) should the Buffalo Soldiers surrender, we know she is lying. But when she wonders aloud why the soldiers are fighting for a country that once enslaved them, segregates them and now uses them as bullet sponges, we cannot help but wonder the same thing ourselves. One of the men comments that he has never felt freer than in the middle of a foreign country at war. While there are several conventional scenes of racism, Lee also allows for moments when the black soldiers cynically question each other, their reason for putting on the uniform, their country’s ideology and their fidelity to that country’s cause.

Miracle at St. Anna is unlike anything Lee has ever undertaken. And it shows. The film is lethargically paced and indefensibly overlong (166 minutes), urgently in need of an editor to wade through the sprawling narrative with an unimpassioned machete. Completely shapeless, it lacks focus and any sort of unifying perspective. It juggles so many plot lines, formulaic templates and flashbacks within flashbacks that when it gathers them all up in the end, we’ve given up caring how they all fit together.

Instead of character development, Lee (and screenwriter James McBride, who also wrote the book on which the film is based) gives us broad stereotypes, devoid of subtext or nuance. The men never rise above types — the cartoonish southern racist, the uppity Uncle Tom, the slick talking con artist who gives his fellow blacks a bad name. Real humans are unrecognizable. In many ways, Train’s “Chocolate Giant” is like Steinbeck’s man-child Lenny, a lumbering oaf with a fierce protective spirit that can switch from gentleness to wrath in the span of a single heartbeat. The image of him effortlessly carrying the diminutive Italian child is heartbreakingly beautiful. Unfortunately, Benson, along with most of the others, overplays his part to the point of laughable caricature.

Matthew Libatique’s romanticized cinematography is painterly, too glowingly beautiful, in fact, for a film pretending to be this gritty. Likewise, Terence Blanchard’s bombastic score never lets up. His admittedly stunning, yet pervasively intrusive music colors every scene, announcing what is going to happen and precisely how we should feel about it.

Lee is a technically brilliant filmmaker, but his battle sequences are amateurish and have the feel of someone playing at war rather than trying to recreate one. He lingers far too long on his carnage, hitting us over the head with crimson-splattered bodies, writhing soldiers and disembodied limbs. War is hell. We get it.

There are moments of greatness. Throughout the film, I was struck by Lee’s ability to channel the sort of old, Italian neo-realism masters that always inspire bejeweled twinkles in Martin Scorsese’s eyes. Yet these moments, powerful as they are, cannot make up for a film that, when scrutinized in its totality, is, at best, a disappointment and, at worst, a failure.

© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.