This one just blew me away. I just bought the DVD because I knew it would be a keeper, and boy was I right. Director Spike Lee always employed an epic sensibility, evidence of his true love for the Hollywood masterpiece, and in
Miracle at St. Anna, he has done the genre justice.
This is a war epic, no doubt.
Miracle at St. Anna is more of a war movie than most, because it shows the effect of war on the so-called non-combatants, who are often the most numerous casualties.
Civil Wars are the Nastiest Wars:
Wars of invasion can be destructive, of course, but often the goal of the invader is to capture some strategic military points and neutralize the military forces of the enemy. The defender's goal is to push the enemy off his territory, and if possible, do it with such force that the invader will think twice before trying it again. That is an oversimplification, I'll admit.
But civil wars are battles for the heart and soul of a nation. Different factions work to purge the entire body politic of the defined enemy, who is essentially their neighbors but who differ from each other in language, religion, skin color, region, economic class, political ideology or some combination of traits. To "purify" the nation, one must exterminate the enemy entirely. Tear down his temples, outlaw his language, rape the women, desecrate their cemeteries, etc. No one is a non-combatant. Everyone from babes in strollers to old folks in wheelchairs is a worthy target of your wrath.
As in the U.S. Civil War, the enemy may be your own brother, or your fellow graduate from West Point. Choosing sides gets messy. Civil wars usually have extremely high body counts, as the goal of battle is not to "win" battles but to shed as many gallons of blood as possible.
Occupations and Civil Wars Can Blur Together:
This is part of the background of
Miracle of St. Anna: Italy's Fascist party dictator, Mussolini, was allied with Adolf Hitler, Nazi party leader of Germany. Mussolini came to power first, and invaded Ethiopia to make up for the lost time that Britain, France, Portugal and even Belgium had in already acquiring overseas colonies. Germany, like Italy, had been only a collection of duchies and micro-states before they unified in the 1860s. Though Mussolini was militaristic, Hitler added the element of race hatred as a stated ideology to the German version of fascism, called Nazisim.
When the Nazis invaded eastern Europe, they usually found locals willing to identify local Jews and hand them over to the Germans. Oddly enough, it was the Italians who hid more Jews from the Nazis than they turned in. It seems the Italians had a stronger sense of humanity than almost any other European Christians. The Italian people also distrusted Mussolini and eventually overthrew him.
This created a problem for the German troops on Italian soil. The Italians were their supposed allies but Italian partisan rebels were attacking them. In reality, the Germans were fighting the Italian people while actually being allied with the Italian government. This also happened in South Vietnam, where the U.S. was supporting the South Vietnamese government against the communist North, but huge elements of the South Vietnamese population were against their own government and therefore the U.S. slaughtered South Vietnamese civilians as suspected communists. Not surprisingly, the U.S. lost this one.
The U.S. was essentially engaged in a civil war with at least two factions of Vietnamese society. That is also what has happened to us in Iraq (and has not yet concluded).
The Real Deal on Film:
Spike Lee does not provide all this background in the film, but it is all evident in gory detail. Lee also tells the story through the eyes of Buffalo Soldiers, American men of African descent, who of course have been present in all phases and events of U.S. history and every major conflict the world over in the 20th century. There was something satisfying about this, seeing white-on-white brutality through black eyes (of the director and the characters), as subversive as Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo)writing about an"Indian with a camera" and taking the power to show, and therefore define, visual reality, a power Euro-Western media and academia institutions usually reserves for themselves. But we people of color have always possessed the power to see and even influence these white-on-white bloodbaths.
Author James McBride, the half-Jewish, African American author of
St. Anna, commented that these European events were now part of Black History because black people were part of them. And Lee doesn't soft soap the racial hypocrisy of the U.S. fighting racist dictatorships in Europe while maintaining a violence-based caste system at home.
Spike and the Italians Redux:
I read once that Spike Lee grew up in a series of Brooklyn neighborhoods that were often mixtures of African American , Italian and Puerto Rican. Except for his first two films, the romantic comedy/drama
She's Gotta Have It , and
School Daze , a musical drama that highlighted black-on-black color conflicts, Italian-Americans have usually featured heavily in Lee's films. Several actors on
The Sopranos appeared in small roles in Spike Lee films.
Jungle Fever and
Do the Right Thing have black-Italian conflict as their central themes.
Spike has now taken his appreciation for Italian people back to Italy
. Miracle at St. Anna has long dialogues in Italian, German and Spanish, but mostly in English and Italian. It's also about Americans overseas, but this time the Americans are black Americans, facing Italians who have never seen a black person up close, except in racist propoganda posters that portrayed Africans as a form of monkey, yet show more respect to our heroes than do their white American officers.
The Real Power of the Miracle of St. Anna:There was also something very Catholic about this movie, and I mean that in the best way possible. The peasants and country priests have the faith of martyrs that should make any Christian feel inspired.
This movie combines everything that is horrifying about
Schindler's List and
Saving Private Ryan. I purchased the DVD because I thought it was a keeper I would want to watch again. But the emotional punch was just too much and I don't know when I'll be able to see it again. But the lessons of war and faith are so well presented here that I know I'll be drawn back.
This is truly one of the great ones.
God bless Spike Lee, author James McBride and everyone else involved.
