Miracle at St Anna

At least now Spike Lee can consider he has provided a fitting riposte to Clint Eastwood. Lee, after severely criticising Eastwood's Flags of our Fathers for ignoring the role of black soldiers during World War II, decided that the best response would be to tell the story himself. Miracle at St. Anna, shown on the second night of the Middle East Film Festival, recounts the battles in Italy of the Buffalo Soldiers, the group of soldiers who (in this film at least) were almost willingly sacrificed in the trenches. Lee does this job well, and deserves praise for highlighting one of the least well-known contributions to the war ? and one of the ones least documented on film. Miracle at St. Anna opens with a former soldier watching John Wayne's The Longest Day and uttering to himself: "We were there too." That apart, it is a clumsy and pitifully suspenseless prologue, despite the attempts to the contrary, pitted with gratuitous celebrity cameos. Eventually, we are at war too, as seen through the eyes of said former soldier. Vast sections of flashback take place, however, in situations he could never have witnessed or had recounted to him. Is this the storyteller descending into complete fiction or is this a glaring oversight? At one point, we are even subjected to a flashback within a flashback. The soldiers eventually rescue an orphan boy found wandering the hills. They take him to safety in a secluded village, pursued by Nazis accompanied by the most ridiculously bombastic "bad guy" music composed in years. It is only at this point that the film comes into its own, however, by portraying a divided family and the Italian partisans defending them. The sequence is capped by a moment of astonishing violence that almost ? almost ? justifies the preceding two hours. Who would have thought that Spike Lee would feel more comfortable producing a gripping tale of betrayal and loyalty among families in rural Italy ? almost entirely in Italian? Probably not even Lee himself, who abandons his bickering soldiers for a good 20 minutes at one point, to the considerable benefit of the film. Sections of Miracle at St. Anna owe a great debt to the best in neorealist Italian cinema, and belong in the same category. But the film is overlong, at 160 minutes, and is tagged with an ending that would be moving were it not for the fact that it sloppily reunited two characters who had practically no affiliation beforehand.

Festival film Spike Lee's sprawling, shambolic war film has some excellent moments but is ultimately crushed under the weight of its own intentions.