Miracle at St. Anna

It's only been a few days since I posted my piece on Spike Lee. In light of those comments and in the interest of fairness I would like to say the following:

Miracle at St. Anna is one of the best Spike Lee movies of the last decade.

Okay, so that may or may not mean much depending on what you think of Lee's last few years, but the fact remains that 'Miracle' is a thoughtful and incredibly evocative film. It is perhaps one of the best "war" movies since Saving Private Ryan. It's ironic, for a film so low on fighting scenes. In a way, that's what makes the film work. The few "actual war" scenes are sparse, but their gravitas is only compounded by their rarity. In the post-Gladiator era, we spend our time searching for these scenes, but it's the others that actually strengthen the film. More on that later.

There are scenes of violence and chaos in this film that will haunt you. They are as visceral and guttural as you would expect from a WWII film, but their horror comes from Lee's technique. Bodies litter the streets of Italian towns, blood fades into the waters of low level rivers and gun shells blow limbs from limbs. We've seen it before, but Lee's camera lingers on the carnage. He swoops, low over bodies and shoots high over the mountains of the Italian countryside. It's not altogether unheard of, but something about Lee's work here seems novel.

In his earlier films Lee often included an extended tracking shot that would follow his characters throughout many of the locale's of the film (the last shot in School Daze—"Wake Up"), and his work here seems reminiscent of it, if not a little more appropriate in this context. From the film, which is based on a true story, it seems fairly apparent that Lee has a great deal of respect for his subject matter. He manages to strike a delicate balance between utterly overwhelming his audience with the indiscriminate and cruel reality of war and ambivalently taking in the carnage himself not altogether certain whether or not you can make judgments about good and evil in wartime.

In a way, the ambiguity of ethics in wartime is the idea of the film. Of course, the staples of Spike Lee's films are present and accounted for (racism, sexuality, etc.), but it seems that Lee has stepped outside of his politics and tried to understand his characters and their role in the world around them. They are confused, and rightfully so. Soldiers in a war for a country that treats them worse than POW's, Lee's motley crew muse on everything from the state of Blacks in the US and abroad to the existence and concern of God himself. It never feels forced, and almost every scene seems to arise from the characters individual reaction to their situation, as second class warriors behind enemy lines. They seem doomed from the start, not because of their position, maybe because of their time.

For the first time in a Spike Lee film the technique (camera angles, shot choice, length of shots, etc.) is the center of the show. The film is honest and does what Lee's Inside Man sets out to do. It raises questions, and answers them with the only answers we have. C'est la vie.

Spike Lee has long been maligned as an idea director who doesn't do things technically correct. Combined with his propensity for racial and social subject matter, Lee's films exist on a plane all alone. It's hard to say he's better or worse than anyone else, because for better or worse, there is no one else.