Wednesday, Oct. 01, 2008

Spike needed to trim 'Miracle at St. Anna'

By Edward Robertson, atomictown.com

I'd hate to imagine what would happen to the entertainment industry if a well-meaning time traveler ever goes back and seduces Hitler's mom before he's born, thereby preventing World War II.

We wouldn't have Paths of Glory or Saving Private Ryan. No Catch-22 or Slaughterhouse-5 or The Naked and the Dead. (Then again, we might not have Norman Mailer at all, so call that a push.) First-person shooters would be drastically less awesome. Yes, if it weren't for the greatest tragedy in human history, it would be a pretty boring present.

So if your life's a miserable hellpit of suffering and torment, buck up: some day, somebody might make a movie out of it, and then they will get rich while your grave goes unvisited. And if you're very, very lucky, it might even be a good movie, unlike Miracle at St. Anna, an overlong, directionless WWII story that should make us question whether the wars we fight are really worth the price later generations will pay in shoddy art and entertainment.

In 1983, an old man shoots a customer down in cold blood. In 1944, that old man was a corporal in the Buffalo Soldiers, the U.S. Army's trial all-black combat force. During an assault on a fortified enemy position, he and three others are separated from their group.

Cut off in the Italian mountains and surrounded by Germans, the four hole up in a small village to find help for a hurt Italian boy they picked up on the way. There, word comes in from their commander: brass believes there's a German counterattack on the way. They need a prisoner to confirm it. And the four Buffalo Soldiers are the only ones in position to take one.

This might create the illusion Miracle at St. Anna has any kind of tension or cohesive plot. Instead, it's sluggish, meandering, overstuffed, and 160 minutes long. Slashing a good 40-60 minutes might not have made it good, but it would have fractionally lowered my impulse to bludgeon myself into unconsciousness with the cell phone I was compulsively checking to see how much damn time was left. Answer: always too much.

Yet it's directed by Spike Lee, who can normally be counted on to at least be entertaining. Hmm, let's see here, written by James McBride -- and based on his own novel?

Uh oh. Even as a bad one, I know how writers think. To us, each word we write is more precious than a rocketship built from kings' bones. We would rather cut our editor's throats than a single line of text. If I were asked to condense a book of mine into a movie script, I would just take their money, then for six straight months pretend to work (just like I do every day) before returning to Big Shot Hollywood Man's office, flinging the untouched novel in his face, then hightailing it for Brazil.

Is this inability to cut what happened to McBride? Hard to say. It would explain the movie's novelistic tendency to digress into subplots and yutz around with side characters as the four soldiers spin their wheels in that stupid village for what can only feel like World Wars II through XVII.

In the attempt to keep everything, the whole movie suffers. We don't get much sense of who the Buffalo Soldiers are, either as individuals or in terms of their historical significance. It feels like there's an important story here, but it's so swamped up with irrelevancies the key notes aren't allowed to ring out.

Lee does put together some gnarly battle sequences. These and the few other potent scenes, when they emerge, are a jarring contrast to the long stretches that surround them: a noodling story, clumsy themes, a nonsensical wrap-up. Too often, Miracle at St. Anna is no more than that everyday non-event, a movie that's just boring.

Grade: C-