Miracle at St. Anna

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

An old African-American man named Hector Negron (Laz Alonso) goes to work one day in the 1980s at a post office. An old Italian man comes up to the window to buy stamps. The two recognize each other. Negron pulls out a gun and shoots him.

A fresh Daily News reporter (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), hunting for a story, goes with two detectives to Negron's apartment. In his closet, they find the head of a statue that's worth millions of dollars. The reporter goes to interview Negron in jail, who will say only one thing: "I know who the Sleeping Man is."

These early scenes in Spike Lee's Miracle at St. Anna progress so strongly, on such an interesting current of mystery, that you almost want the film to stay in that time period. But then we jump to September 1944 for answers, when Negron was a corporal in the all-black 92nd Infantry Division in World War II.

The opening battle sequence is terrific. The platoon is advancing across the Serchio River in Italy while the Nazis hiding across the river set up loudspeakers blasting the sultry propaganda of "Axis Sally," who promises willing women and total freedom in Germany. The mood is haunting and dreamlike, broken only when the Nazis start attacking. The white U.S. superior officer, partly due to inexperience and partly due to racism, orders artillery strikes on their position, and when four soldiers get past the river, he assumes they're lying because he doesn't believe they could've gotten that far. The battle is based on a real one.

In the aftermath, one of the four who made it across, Train (Omar Benson Miller, pulling double-duty this fall with this and The Express) finds and saves a young boy who's trapped in a half-collapsed shed. The boy, Angelo, has an imaginary friend named Arturo and speaks only in Italian. That doesn't matter to Train, who basically adopts him.

After that, the soldiers -- who along with Negron and Train are Stamps (Derek Luke) and Cummings (Michael Ealy) -- come upon a small Tuscan village, and the movie settles down into a long stay. This middle section is where the film is at its weakest. None of the four main soldiers emerges as the dominant character, leaving the focus muddled, and a few plot points reek of standard-issue movie complications. At one point, the soldiers inexplicably take the word of an Italian partisan whom they already decided they didn't trust. They didn't trust him because the boy Angelo doesn't trust him, but even though Stamps can speak Italian and could ask Angelo, they never bother trying to figure out why. Then there's a party in a town hall with food and dancing when it's already been established that (a) there's barely any food left anywhere and (b) the town is surrounded on all sides by Nazis.

A subplot involving the beautiful ...