Review of Miracle at St. Anna (2008) by Alan L — 11 Jun 2009

This movie should have been great. The actors are spectacular, and the setup seems engrossing. Buffalo soldiers, partisans, a German on the run from his own army captured, knowing a terrible secret. The camera is unshy about the gore.

The opening scenes setup a tense mystery. And it goes SPLAT! Sure, it takes more than 1 hour 15 minutes to get to the soldiers "mission" (essentially sit around for a while and wait), and after 1 hour more of waiting their army rescuers are so racist and incompetent that they are sitting ducks for the kindly Nazis to put them out of their misery.

At the end I was in tears. Yes tears, because something that could have been so great, something that went through the hands of such a top cast, writer, director, had to end on such an atrocious fart of a an deus ex machina where <> the little boy grows up and bails the elderly Hector out of his murder trial with the cash he made as a seat belt saleman.

That little boy who we had become quite sick of given the many scenes of him calling Train his savior a "chocolate giant" in some perverse felinni childlike wonder schmaltz. Yes, its chock full of fellini moments, what with the 5 minute dream sequence where the soldiers are at a midwest diner where the diner owner serves nazi soldiers but the blacks have to eat out back.

You ask, perhaps, why couldn't Spike have played this straight. It would have been a beautiful film, the realities of the Buffalo soldiers and the St. Anna episode have far enough pathos to have to add such magical realist melodrama.

Certainly the mashup of Chitlin circuit, italian neo-realism, and overwrought modern American historical-realistic-"german secret"-mystery fiction, is a class to itself. Perhaps it is the middle finger Spike wanted to deliver to Eastwood and his yellow/white focused Iwo-Jima films.

It seems to mock bitterly the entire pathos of the genre, identify how artificial it feels for actors born after 1980 to pretend to be GI's with cheapo actors from Italy/German camping up their own parts.

The heroes of that war are disappearing around us, quite unimpressed by any of these youngsters takes on their endeavors. Is it stupid to believe we honor and do justice by these fantasies, or are we simply using their stories to say something about the world we're in now.