Chris does TIFF: Miracle at St. Anna edition

Miracle at St. Anna
Saturday, Saturday, September 13th, 8:30pm
Ryerson Theatre

A week late, and hardly insightful and indepth. But the following review encapsulates about all I have to say regarding this film.

Spike Lee’s greatest strength as a director is his uncompromising vision. Artistically I’ve always found him to be fairly hit or miss, but sometimes, through sheer strength of will alone, he’s able to elevate the quality of his films to a level they would otherwise not be able to achieve. Sadly, that vision is lacking in his latest outing, Miracle at St. Anna.

The film follows the lives of four black soldiers, of the 92nd infantry division, colloquially known as the Buffalo soldiers, after they get trapped in a small Italian village during the second World War. The film is based on a book by James McBride and for some strange reason Spike allows multiple subplots, backstorys and flashbacks to clutter up the main narrative of the film. Instead of dealing with the situation at hand, (how the fuck do we get out of Dodge), we find ourselves sitting through convoluted love triangles, the discovery of a long lost cultural treasure, the subterfuge and deception of the Italian Resistance and a handful of other plotlines that work against the film’s natural rhythm. Perhaps that’s why the film feels so bloated at just over three hours long.

Seeing as how the film’s screenwriter, McBride, also wrote the book it shouldn’t come as a surprise that all these unnecessary subplots were carried over when he adapted his own source material. I’m guessing, as a writer, he was loath to edit his babies. If McBride didn’t have the strength to cut down the length of his screenplay then Spike should have made the tough calls when he was in the editing room and chucked some of the dead weight overboard, turning this lumbering frigate of a film into a streamlined powerboat.

It’s not a bad film, or even a dull film. It’s a long, rambling, unnecessarily meandering film that you can’t help but want to be over just so you can step out to the washroom and relieve the pressure on your kidneys.

This film is destined to fall into Spike’s ‘nearly ran’ file folder, denied the honour of standing alongside his greater masterpieces. It’s a clear example of being slavishly held to the whims of the original source material and not making the proper allowances to the conventions of its newly adopted medium.