Review: Miracle at St. Anna

In his first U.S.-Italy co-production, Spike Lee salutes classic WWII movies with bloated, scattershot drama about African-American soldiers behind Nazi lines in Italy. They adopt a traumatized 9-year-old Angelo (Matteo Sciabordi), encounter a treacherous Fascist, a good German or two, and then they all get shot. Corporal Hector Negron (Laz Alonso) survives and brings home a marble head that a fallen comrade in arms (Omar Benson Miller) carried around as a good luck charm. One day in 1983, after watching John Wayne in “The Longest Day,” this Harlem postal clerk shoots an elderly Italian customer with a German Luger. In one of many dumb devices, a first-day-on-the-beat reporter (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) desperately needs a scoop. The mute perp, who may have seen Charles Foster Kane utter “Rosebud,” whispers something cryptic about the “sleeping man.” A bit later, a newspaper belonging to an American dealer in Nazi art in Italy (John Leguizamo) is blown out his window and flutters down to a sidewalk cafe where a customer (Luigi Lo Cascio) beholds a front-page photo of that marble head. He turns up in the last scene; the dealer is never seen again in a screenplay that James McBride contrived from his 2003 novel. Racism, Catholic mysticism and magical realism share the screen with one random 360-degree dolly shot, casualties of war with their eyes wide open, and bizarre comic music cues by composer Terence Blanchard. Lee indulges his fixation on sexy power females with characters played by Laila Petrone, Valentina Cervi, Alexandra Maria Lara and Kerry Washington. With Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, Benson Miller, Pierfrancesco Favino, John Turturro, D.B. Sweeney, Robert John Burke, Omari Hardwick, whom Lee lists with the retro rubric of “The Players.” 166m. Anamorphic 2.40 widescreen. (Bill Stamets)