Miracle at St. Anna is to Spike Lee what Alexander was to Oliver Stone: a colossal failure, a blunder that makes film fans rub their eyes like Muhammad Ali in the Sonny Liston fight, bewildered and reeling. Lee went all in by choosing this epic literary story of four African-American soldiers (Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, Laz Alonso, Omar Benson Miller) making their way deep into Nazi-occupied Italy at the tail end of the Second World War. The director’s stake is certainly compounded, fairly or not, by his earlier dust-up with Clint Eastwood over Eastwood’s exclusion of black soldiers from his Second World War films. But Lee’s ego combines with his bookish knowledge of film history to take Miracle down a disastrous path of wearying genre imitation, utterly convoluted plotting and surprisingly anemic craftsmanship.
The film opens in the 1980s and follows an elderly black veteran living mostly anonymously in New York City, unrecognized by John Wayne’s — or Eastwood’s — Hollywood, or the American public at large. One day, he goes to work and shoots a man in cold blood upon taking one look at his face. Homicide detective John Turturro and rookie reporter Joseph Gordon-Levitt, saddlebagged with absurd hard-boiled dialogue despite the incompatible decade, are on the case — for all of three seconds. Turturro disappears, never to be seen again, with Gordon-Levitt following suit soon thereafter. This becomes a recurring blunder in the film, with characters and plot elements that would appear to be central to the story disappearing without notice. Meanwhile, superfluous speaking parts are delivered minute after tiresome minute to lead Miracle farther asunder and ruin any chance of establishing some sense of rhythm and consistency. The film stumbles through a series of fairly standard war set pieces and bizarre scenes featuring the four leads and the fanciful caricatures populating an Italian village. Comprising the bulk of the film, these scenes are painfully whimsical and occur without rhyme or reason in terms of pacing or character motivation. The first culprit to blame for the discombobulated and woefully uninvolving story is the screenwriter, James McBride, who is also the author of the source book. Miracle may in fact be a testament to why films omit scenes and story arcs that their literary incarnations feature prominently — because they can’t fit.
The ultimate failure is the director’s. Where once the performances he coaxed would have been compelling and brashly theatric, now they are absurdly histrionic. Where once his stylistic choices would have been courageous or at least intriguing, now they are laughable. Where once his craftsmanship could not be questioned even when the finished product was questionable, his current work is a disaster made by an auteur-turned-amateur whose self-esteem has steadily ballooned and finally exploded, leaving a Howitzer-sized crater. In fact, the only miracle in this film is that it eventually ended.
