miracle at st. anna

I met up with MJTW the IV this week for a movie. Like I said, he's on the SAG Awards nominating committee so he gets to attend free screenings of the awardiest films. I sat with him for half an hour before the screening and we exchanged some small talk. "Do you have brothers or sisters?" or, in this case, "Do you have a 23 year-old son?"  (Yes, and yes.) I feel weird about all the feigning of interest required for my new utilitarian approach to social possibilities. Blogs are for discretion, so let's meet for a drink and I'll tell you the extremely unsordid details. 

We saw Miracle at St. Anna, Spike Lee's newest. The more I think about it, the less I like it. The story (spoiler alert): In 1944, a band of four black WWII soldiers get stranded in an Italian village while bringing a sick Italian orphan to help. The sick orphan is the only survivor from a gruesome massacre of civilians by Nazis in the town of St. Anna. Nazis and a backstabbing Italian Nazi-collaborator eventually bring three of the four soldiers and almost the entire village to their deaths, but not before the soldiers have stayed in the village a few days and reflected upon how well they have been treated in a place that is not the racist American South. In 1984, the Italian backstabber is murdered by the surviving soldier. Police, who don't know the backstory, are perplexed, and an enterprising young (and extremely poorly cast) journalist extracts the 1944 story from the soldier. It's told in extended flashback. Then there's an arraignment for the murder conviction, a ridiculous courtroom scene, and then the soldier is bailed out, and presumably spirited away to a country that has no extradition agreement with America, by the same orphan whom the soldiers rescued in 1944, who has since grown up to be a billionaire inventor of safety belts. 

The 1944 story is touching, and is primarily about how a few personalities mix together under intense circumstances for a few days that culminate in tragedy - the Spike Lee of Do the Right Thing is at work here. But almost every one of the multiple frames he puts on top of this story fails. The journalist is a gimmick to tell the story in flashback. John Leguizamo appears half-naked for one scene in which his lover mounts him and launches the morning newspaper he is reading out the window in the throes of passion. That paper lands on the orphan's cafe table and informs him that the soldier has killed the backstabber - really, that's John Leguizamo's only function in the movie, and you never see him again. The courtroom scene at the end is comically fake. There's a last-second substitution of the soldier's fuddy-duddy attorney with a bosomy no-nonsense dealmaker who announces to the courtroom that the $2m bail will be paid "in cash," to gasps. And there's a recurring statue head that the soldiers carry around and rub occasionally for luck, and it seems to have supernatural powers, as does the orphan boy - but the movie is not quite in touch with its own weirdness to explore either of these things.

Opening credits is a field of white crucifixes that turn red one by one. A nice, harrowing effect. Closing credits are written with crucifixes in lieu of "T"s. God, churches, prayer, crucifixes, and coincidences are everywhere. But you get the feeling watching the movie that Spike Lee isn't a religious person at all, and that the movie is about secular humanism. The titular "miracle" is ironic; what happens at St. Anna is a massacre, not a miracle. The orphan survives it not because of a divine intervention, but because of the goodhearted acts of a few people - that's the real miracle. There are American, Italian, and even Nazi heroes and villains. Nazi heroes in an American movie! I love your generosity, Spike Lee. 

But the movie is uncomfortable with its secularism, and I think all the frames exist around the 1944 story because of this discomfort. The frames are a second stab at the "miracle." The second "miracle" of the movie is the series of freak coincidences that occur in 1984 that bring the backstabber to the soldier, the soldier to the newspapers, the newspapers to the orphan, the orphan to the rescue, and eventually, the soldier to the orphan. Maybe all of these coincidences are meant to suggest God's presence, but the movie treats this not as a solemn divine intervention but as a jaunty caper. There is actually dancing pizzicato caper music under some of these scenes. Spike Lee, WHAT THE FUCK? Half of your story is about a MASSACRE and RACISM and BETRAYAL and DEATH and the other half is a tiptoeing caper about funny coincidences? Spike Lee, WHAT THE FUCK? 

And if the whole story was engineereed by God to be a miracle, what is the point? God's justice is a bloodthirsty vengeance, and the purpose of the miracle is to allow the soldier who murdered the Italian backstabber forty years after the war to flee criminal persecution?  Is the message xenophobia? Because the you don’t see the Italian backstabber in the intervening forty years but can imagine: he left Italy in shame; moved to America to start a new life free from a shameful personal history, like so many immigrants have done; lived quietly for forty years; became American? Is there no hope for redemption in the unlikely story that is America?*

I mentioned some of these things to MJTW the IV. He responded, “I liked it! Was that a true story?” It was one of those moments where I really, really missed my clever ex-girlfriend, that fucking bitch.

* Although it is true there is no room in the unlikely story that is America for the Radovan Karadžićs of the world, there is room for the Pavels, right?