"Miracle at St. Anna"

Miracle at St. Anna ****

While watching Miracle at St. Anna, I felt like I was in the presence of a work of art—a work of art that was, quite literally, unfolding before my very eyes.
The film is, by any measure, an emotional and visual ordeal. A truly visceral experience, it over-brims with violence, cruelty, and ugliness—in short, most, if not all, of the terrible things that human beings inflict upon one another.
But the movie also finds Spike Lee fulfilling his promise as one of America’s finest living filmmakers. Miracle at St. Anna is one of the most powerful and ambitious indictments of violence and racism—indeed, of war—that has ever been committed to the silver screen.
Based upon the novel by James McBride, Miracle at St. Anna begins in the guise of a murder mystery. It is the early 1980s, and postal clerk Hector Negron (Laz Alonso) makes headlines when he blows away a patron with a German-made, World War II-era Luger in the lobby of a Staten Island post office.
Subsequent investigation by newspaper reporter Tim Boyle (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) reveals that Hector is a veteran of the Second World War, earned a Purple Heart, and has led, for all intents and purposes, an admirable and quiet life.
Through his unabashed use of magical realism, Lee takes us back in time to explore Hector’s military past—specifically, his harrowing experiences in Tuscany in 1944. With the German army suffering from food and ammunition shortages, the Warmacht is in retreat, while the Allies are pushing ever forward.
As a member of the famed Buffalo Soldiers—the African-American brigade that fought in a host of different American conflicts—Hector finds himself deep in enemy territory, along with his fellow infantrymen Stamps (Derek Luke), the troop’s ethical, cool-headed leader; Bishop (Michael Ealy), an inveterate ladies’ man; and Train (Oman Benson Miller), the gentle giant who carries around the massive head of a Florentine statue as his unlikely good-luck charm.
They are welcomed into a tiny mountain hamlet by Renata (Valentina Cervi), who, along with the other townspeople, is exhausted by war and ready to live again. And then there’s eight-year-old Angelo (Matteo Sciabordi), who is rescued from certain death by Train, with whom he forms a deep and moving relationship.
It is at this juncture that Lee performs a minor miracle of his own. The director manages to inject a quartet of Italian freedom-fighters, not to mention a host of shifting timescapes, into the mix without losing his audience in a haze of political and cultural convolutions.
For Lee, Miracle at St. Anna is nothing short of a masterpiece. In its own way, the film is a bracing depiction of the perils of racism and hate. Perhaps even more damning, Miracle at St. Anna underscores the dangers that loom when we forget the interconnectedness that all of us share—the very stuff that makes us truly human after all.