Hey, everyone. “Moriarty” here.
I’ll be curious to see how the reviews come in on this one. It’s been a few days since I saw it, and I’m still turning parts of it over, still trying to decide exactly where it falls in Spike Lee’s overall filmography for me. I know this much: it may be his film geekiest film so far, and that’s saying something. I’ve never understood why Spike isn’t a more frequent topic of conversation among film nerds. Like Jarmusch, like the Coens, like Soderbergh... he’s part of that late ‘80s/early ‘90s indy explosion where we suddenly started seeing filmmakers who had been raised on a concentrated diet of movies, people who were working completely outside the studio system making films that expressed these intensely personal visions, but with this enormous filmmaking vocabulary that was obviously derived from those movies they grew up on. I know Quentin Tarantino is seen as the sort of perfect storm of film geekery in terms of how his movies work, these crazy Frankenstein monsters of all the films he’s ever seen, but I see him more as part of a continuum that features guys like Scorsese and De Palma at one end and guys like Edgar Wright at the other end, people who make movies that are much about movies as they are about anything else. In some ways, that’s never been clearer for Lee than it is with MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA, which plays as a potent cocktail, made up of equal parts 1930’s Warner Bros. melodrama, 1940’s WWII picture, and 1950’s Italian neorealism. Toss in a dash of magic and a hint of miracle, and you’ve got this oddball epic that may be one of his messiest narratives, but also one of his most technically accomplished films overall.
The film is structured as a mystery. At the beginning, we’re in modern-day New York City, and an elderly black man rolls up on another guy in a post office and shoots him with an old German Luger. He’s arrested, and a rookie newspaper reporter (Joseph Gordon Levitt) starts trying to piece together what would have led to the shooting. The gunman turns out to be a solid member of the community, a war hero with a Purple Heart, without any criminal record at all. And yet, when police search his apartment, they come up with a rare Italian art piece that’s been missing since WWII.
That artifact’s significance, and who exactly the gunman and the victim were, are the key points that Lee holds back from us for as long as he can. “I know who the Sleeping Man is” becomes our only clue as we suddenly flash back to September 1944, which is where most of the story unfolds. When I first heard an announcement about this film, I heard that it had something to do with the Buffalo Soldiers, and I wrongly assumed that the film would deal primarily with the notion of being a black unit in a white-man’s Army. Although race is certainly an undercurrent to much of the film’s drama, this is not a movie that is primarily focused on ideas of race and identity. Instead, it’s just a good story that allows Lee room to explore any number of ideas, a WWII story we haven’t seen before, and I think he takes advantage of the idea that this is an epic. It’s his BAND OF BROTHERS, so to speak. And that cocktail of different influences I mentioned is really fascinating to watch play out. When the film starts, it’s like he’s working the same muscle he used for INSIDE MAN. It’s sort of a set-up for a suspense picture. Levitt’s sincere as he chases the story, as he hammers the stubborn, silent old man in jail. And as the story starts to fall into place around the world, we see a few Spike Lee regulars in these little vignettes, here and gone in a moment or two. Guys like John Leguizamo and John Turturro, who you’d expect to see in major supporting roles, are really just cameos, parts of the string of coincidence that has its origin in the hills of Italy all those years ago.
Once you’re back in time, the focus falls square on four soldiers, part of a much larger platoon that’s trying to cross a river. That’s it. Not an important river. Not a particularly beautiful or sacred place. Just a river. And they walk into a shitstorm in the process and get cut down. It’s staged with all the graphic aplomb you’d expect from a war movie a decade after SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, but there’s nothing heroic about it. These guys are cut down, torn apart. It’s brutal. And Spike illustrates through some of his cutaways how the Buffalo Soldiers were used to test areas, flush out ambushes, expendable ground troops to send in before you send the real Army in afterwards to clean up. It’s a rotten idea, and to the credit of James McBride’s script, there are a number of white characters who feel strongly that these troops deserve the same respect and firepower support as any other troops under their command. Not everyone’s a bigot or a jackass.
But during that tense scene out there along both sides of the river, there’s a German version of Tokyo Rose being broadcast over the battlefield, the provocative Axis Sally, played by the sultry Alexandra Maria Lara (so good in last year’s CONTROL and YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH). As the Buffalo Soldiers try to cross the river, she broadcasts this demoralizing constant chatter about how they're fighting a war for a country that doesn't love them, and how all they need to do is put down their weapons and join the Germans, and they'll feed them and love them and give them white women to fuck and fried chicken to eat. It's the single most racially charged sequence in the movie, and what makes it really work (as opposed to a later scene in an ice cream parlor that feels too cookie-cutter) is that there's an element of truth to everything she says, and all of the soldiers know it. That bitter reality makes each step an act of faith, and it really drives home just how selfless the actions of these men were. It's easy to fight when you know you'll be rewarded for it, but it's a lot harder when you have to hope that your actions will eventually result in a better world for your kids, if not for you.
Even within the group of four soldiers who survive and actually somehow make it across the river, there are tensions regarding trust and conduct and faith. Spike doesn’t make this an “us against them” movie in any way. Even among the Germans he portrays, he doesn’t paint in absolutes. The film has faith in individuals, no matter what is happening in the world around them, but it’s not so sunshiney that it pretends everyone will always make the right choices. 2nd Staff Sgt. Aubrey Stamps (Derek Luke) is the level-headed decent moral compass of the group, while Sgt. Bishop Cummings (Michael Ealy) is the little devil on everyone else’s shoulders. Corporal Hector Negron (Laz Alonso) is the guy who can be counted on to do the right thing under fire, the calm, steady presence who you want on your side. And then there’s Pvt. 1st Class Sam Train, played by Omar Benson Miller. It’s the love it or hate it storyline of the film, and Miller’s performance is pretty far out there. He seems to be doing exactly what Lee wants, though, and I found myself won over by him, charmed by his relationship with Angelo (Matteo Sciabordi), a little boy they find in a bombed-out barn.
There’s a lot of story here, but rather than bury you in synopsis, I’ll say this: I like the way Lee keeps taking left turns from one movie to another movie to another movie to another movie. Eventually, it gets you so off-balance that when he does take you to St. Anna, what you get is certainly not what you think you’re getting. Lee builds his movie to skip along until he wants to suckerpunch you, and it works. I appreciate that I did not know how this story was going to connect the dots until the moment it actually did, and that’s a rare and genuine pleasure. Valentina Cervi makes a particularly strong impression as Renata, a local woman in the small Italian village where the American soldiers take refuge. She does an electrifying topless scene, and later she manages to make an Army helmet look sexy in another sequence. She does a great job of shading in the quiet pain of a war widow, still struggling for survival without even the solace of answers to soothe her.
Matthew Libatique nails it with this, his third Spike Lee film. This is a beautiful movie, and he handles the tonal shifts in subtle, wonderful ways. Check out the scene where we first see Angelo in the barn. It’s like a clip from CINEMA PARADISO for a moment. It is such a totally different tone and look and feel than any scene before it that I almost thought it was the wrong movie. Lee hasn’t always had the most optimistic of outlooks in his films, so I’m sort of amazed he wanted to make this material into a film. This is a movie that believes in the possibility of grace, and Libatique alternates between an unforgiving realistic eye and a dreamy sort of romantic thing, depending on the moment. Terrence Blanchard’s powerful score certainly lends the film a recognizable Spike Lee feeling, and it’s one of the best of the collaborations between them.
I’m not sure I thought everything in the film added up, but griping about this dead end or that narrative digression almost feels petty when you’re dealing with a film this ambitious and rich. What I like most about Spike Lee overall is that he seems to be one of the few filmmakers who is not just constantly pushing himself, but who seems ready for whatever changes come to the film industry in the future. Here’s a guy who has shot giant-budget studio films like MALCOLM X that are epic in scale and theme, and who has also worked in DV video. He’s made self-financed indie films, and he’s worked in both narratives and features. Lee is the real deal, a filmmaker because he has to be, because it’s just part of his DNA, and I think the guys who are going to endure as our industry and distribution continue to change are the guys like him, who realize that they don’t have to do the same thing the same way every time. Even when I don’t love his films... and make no mistake, I think MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA is pretty damn good... I know that there is always something new and worthwhile in store when I sit down for A Spike Lee Joint. I’m just pleased to see him continue to redefine exactly what that means more than 20 years after making his first film. When so many big-name directors find themselves trapped into doing one thing, Spike Lee has proven consistently that the only person who defines what he does is him.
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles
