Miracle at St. Anna

After reaching the East Coast at the end of October, I had the pleasure of spending a week in Silver Spring, Maryland as the guest of one of my friends, a professional artist with his own studio. I told him about my moviewatching goal, and he suggested right away that I take the opportunity of my visit to enjoy a showing at the newly restored AFI Silver Theatre, the flagship movie house of the American Film Institute in Silver Spring.

The "now showing" movies at the Silver included one I had been anticipating for months: Spike Lee's Miracle at St. Anna, the World War II drama about African American soldiers fighting in Italy. From the trailer, the story seemed like interesting original concept. The mysterious title somehow made me think of the 1969 Stanley Kramer classic Secret of Santa Vittoria, about Italian villagers protecting their wine from the Nazis. The idea of a "miracle" movie appealed to me, considering that even getting to Maryland had felt miraculous to me.

The theater did not disappoint. What had recently been an abandoned urban movie house was now a fully restored jewel just off a stop on the Metro Red Line. I arrived early and killed some time looking at the glowing reviews of the restoration from Clint Eastwood and Danny Glover. I was slightly disappointed that the gift shop didn't have postcards for sale.

But, as you've probably learned by now if you've seen it or read anything about it, the movie sucked. There's no mincing words here: it was just utterly dreadful. It has to be my leading candidate for Disappointment of the Year. The original concept was entirely wasted. The story was a pointless wandering indulgence in Death Porn, a ghastly unintended parody of the postwar Neorealism of, say, Two Women.

Here's a bunch of dead black soldiers in the river. Here's a bunch of dead Italian villagers. Let's kill everyone. Isn't it fun?

The most sympathetic character in the movie was a Wehrmacht colonel who gives an American black soldier a Luger pistol and tells him to defend himself.

The only decent part of the movie was the score, which lingered in my head as I drove home.

At the end, all I could think was, "What miracle!?" The movie fails on every level---as a statement against war, and as a statement against racism. It fails as suspense. It fails as a mystery. It fails as history.

My review of the theater itself: it's beautiful, to be sure, and I'm very glad they restored it, but considering the horrible state of parking in downtown Silver Spring, the main reason I would go out of my way to see a film there would be to support the AFI over the corporations that run the multiplexes. On the other hand, the Silver has regular talks by well-known people in the industry. I had just missed Farley Granger!