Spike Lee has long been America's most serious black filmmaker, never lacking or shying away from a tough racial agenda. Time, now, to eliminate the word "black" from that appraisal: Lee's agenda in "Miracle at St. Anna" is no less racial-historical yet far more ambitiously universal than ever before.After his 2006 crime drama "Inside Man" (a rare commercial success), Lee intended his next movie to be about James Brown or the Rodney King race riots, but, encountering obstacles to both of those projects, turned to a James McBride novel for a World War II action drama about black American soldiers in Nazi-occupied Italy.It opens in 1983 with a New York post office employee truly "going postal" -- shooting a customer at point-blank range, inexplicably, from his window. A standard news-reporter framing device is employed to unravel the mystery in flashback.Italy, September 1944: As the Allies fight to drive the Germans north, four American GIs of the all-black 92nd Infantry Division are caught behind enemy lines. One of them rescues a traumatized Italian boy near a little Tuscan village, where the family of beautiful Renata (Valentina Cervi) reluctantly gives them shelter.The story is inspired by the horrendous Aug. 12, 1944, Sant'Anna di Stazzema massacre in which Nazi SS troops slaughtered 560 people -- mostly women and children, the youngest being 20 days old -- in a reprisal for Italian partisan activity. Lee's rendering of it posits four black heroes with conflicting social backgrounds: Staff Sgt. Aubrey Stamps (Derek Luke), a sensitive college graduate with faith as well as doubt in American values; Sgt. Bishop Cummings (Michael Ealy), a slick-talking ladies' man with a silver tooth and maddening smile; Cpl. Hector Negron (Laz Alonso), a dark-skinned Puerto Rican from Harlem; and Pvt. Sam Train (Omar Benson Miller), the gentle, deeply religious "Chocolate Giant" man-child who teaches a 9-year-old orphan (Matteo Sciabordi) a tapping system to communicate in one of the film's most touching scenes.Prolific director Lee has 19 important films to his credit -- a pace matched by Woody Allen and few others -- virtually one a year since "She's Gotta Have It" (1986), including "Do the Right Thing" (1989), "Malcolm X" (1992) and "He Got Game" (1998). My personal favorite is "Bamboozled" (2000), a brilliantly bitter satire about black actors doing a TV minstrel show -- in blackface!Re: this one, Lee trashed Clint Eastwood for failing to include black characters in his 2006 World War II movies "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters From Iwo Jima." Eastwood struck back, and Steven Spielberg had to be enlisted as peacemaker.What's not in doubt is that more than 1 million African-Americans served in WWII . The 92nd Infantry's Buffalo Soldiers, so named by American Indians for the all-black cavalry units formed after the Civil War, were forced to retreat in Italy by crack German troops, bad communications and conflicting orders -- but mostly by a lack of trust between the soldiers and their white officers. The Buffalos were essentially used as cannon fodder -- knowing that, even if they survived, "when they got home, looking at a white woman wrong could still get them lynched," says Lee.In the film at hand, Lee wants to give them a kind of "Saving Private Ryan," "Sands of Iwo Jima" and "Life Is Beautiful" of their own -- all in one. He hits us over the head with a racist Louisiana ice-cream-stand scene and with an over-the-top Nazi propaganda broadcast. At 166 minutes, his film is overlong and at times hard to follow.In trying to do it all, Lee only does some of it well. But more power to him, to the uniformly excellent cast and to the unforgettable images of this unique war film, with its requisite (but not surfeit of) carnage. This may not be the definitive wartime human epic Spike Lee wanted it to be, but it is epic and human enough.Rating: R for strong war violence, language, some sexual content and nudity.(Pittsburgh Post-Gazette film critic Barry Paris can be reached at parispg48(at)aol.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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