[rating:4.5]
Director: Spike Lee
Starring: Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, Laz Alonso, Omar Benson Miller, Valentina Cervi
Spike Lee movies vary in quality to a degree rarely seen among filmmakers. You can always count on a Scorcese movie to be pretty damned good, at minimum, and you can always trust Michael Bay to deliver something between a steaming turd and a turd. Spike Lee, however, will comfortably crank out something as unbearably awful as 2004’s She Hate Me, and yet it’s no surprise when he can come up with something as engaging as his latest, The Miracle at St. Anna.
To enjoy this film, you have to forgive certain hamfisted moments, mostly involving the framing sequences that occupy maybe fifteen minutes on either side of the main flashback. The film starts in 1983, with a shocking and inexplicable incident, a few cuts to characters whose significance we don’t understand, and then, very quickly, we’re in World War II for most of the movie. The weakly written framing sequences depend on coincidence and narrative cliché that’s meant to provide resonance to the war story. Thing is, the war story is good, and if the filmmakers (and, presumably, novelist James McBride who wrote the book and adaptation) had tried harder to make the war story satisfy on its won, we wouldn’t need the cheap dramatic wrapper to provide lazy resonance.
The film, which would’ve starred Wesley Snipes if not for the happy coincidence of his massive tax problems, is much better in the hands of a largely unknown or underexposed cast. We follow four soldiers from the all-black 92nd Infantry as they fight Nazis in Italy, ending up hiding out in a Tuscan village. 
Who lives, who dies, what the movie is “about” are all up in the air. As with last year’s great, thinking person’s WWII film, Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, the war section doesn’t feel structured around simple moralities, simple victories or simple narrative arcs. Like war itself, it feels as though the stakes are high and anything can happen. A running thread of superstition and faith thematically underlines the life and death circumstances.
While the film is long—two hours and 40 minutes—it doesn’t drag, particularly once Lee has brought the focus to the four soldiers who drive the story. From this point, which admittedly might’ve been reached sooner, every character has his or her (there’s a pretty village girl, wouldn’tcha know it) own story and needs, and Lee has an excellent ensemble bringing them to life. 
This is Lee’s first war movie, and he handles the elaborately staged military action as skillfully as the intimate character moments.
Speaking of hamfisted, Lee is occasionally obtuse on the issue of racism in the film, but frankly, Lee has rarely been accused of politcal subtlety, and it’s not like he’s wrong on these points. Sure, a flashback-within-flashback to Louisiana could’ve been cut, but otherwise, critics need not beat Lee up too much for some inelegant or repetitive focus on that theme. After all, it’s not like we’ve been flooded with stories of black soldier’s unappreciated sacrifices in WWII.
Still … that damned framing sequence. It’s used solely to provide fairly cheap dramatic catharsis to a story that deserved a better-thought-out conclusion. That weakness, in particular, seems to be sticking in the craw of many critics, but it must be put in perspective: First, this film has a lot of strengths, and second, while Spike Lee can make unbearable crap, this ain’t that. Lee could have made this film better, but he’s still made one of the most compelling movies you’ll see this year, and one that’s worth seeing on the big screen.
