Miracle at St. Anna

Director: Spike Lee Spike Lee

Overview

Spike Lee's World War II film Miracle at St. Anna begins in 1983 with Hector Negron, a veteran of that war, unexpectedly shooting a customer dead. Police discover that the suspect, a quiet postal worker, kept a statue head worth millions of dollars in his apartment. An eager young reporter (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) interviews Negron in his cell about the mysterious artifact. While serving in the all-minority 92nd "Buffalo Soldier" Division, Negron and three comrades managed to sneak deep into enemy territory in Italy. One of the men, Sam Train (Omar Benson Miller), picked the head up while they were serving in Florence and believes it brings him good luck. Negron (Laz Alonso), Train, and Bishop Cummings (Michael Ealy), along with their sergeant, Aubrey Stamps (Derek Luke), take refuge in the Italian village of St. Anna, harbored by locals who are resisting the Nazis -- who themselves surround the area. Train also protects an injured Italian boy he discovers while investigating a seemingly abandoned dwelling. Eventually, the soldiers make contact with their superiors, and are ordered to capture a German so that he may be interrogated about an upcoming attack. Lee adapted Miracle at St. Anna from a novel by James McBride, who also penned the screenplay.

Product Details

Release Date:	02/10/2009
UPC:	0786936775372
Original Release:	2008
Rating:	R
Source:	Touchstone / Disney
Region Code:	1
Presentation:	[Wide Screen]
Sound:	[Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround]
Language:	English
Time:	2:40:00
Sales rank:	29,665

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Derek Luke	Le sergent Aubrey Stamps
Michael Ealy	Sgt Bishop Cummings
Laz Alonso	Caporal Hector Negron
Omar Benson Miller	Sam Train
Pierfrancesco Favino	Pepi "the Great Butterfly" Grotta
Valentina Cervi	Renata
Matteo Sciabordi	Angelo Torancelli -- the Boy
John Turturro	Detective "Tony" Ricci
Joseph Gordon-Levitt	Tim Boyle
John Leguizamo	Enrico
D.B. Sweeney	Colonel Driscoll
Kerry Washington	Zana Wilder
Robert John Burke	General Ned Almond
Omari Hardwick	Actor
Omari Antonutti	Huggs,Ludovico
Sergio Albelli	Rodolfo
Lidia Biondi	Actor
Malcolm Goodwin	Actor
Giselda Volodi	Iole
Max Malatesta	Major Gerhard Bergmann
Ralph Palka	Lieutenant Claussen
Massimo De Santis	Don Innocenzo Lazzeri
Michele de Virgilio	Paolo
Luigi Lo Cascio	Angelo Torancelli
Alexandra Maria Lara	Axis Sally
Jan Pohl	Hans Brundt
Walton Goggins	Captain Nokes
Tory Kittles	Lieutenant Birdsong
Christian Berkel	Captain Eichholz
Waldemar Kobus	Colonel Pflueger
Chiara Francini	Fabiola
Federigo Ceci	Umberto
Terence Blanchard	Composer

Technical Credits

James McBride

Spike Lee	Director,Producer
James McBride	Screenwriter
Luigi Musini	Producer
Robert Cicutto	Producer,Producer
Jon Kilik	Executive Producer,Producer
Marco Valerio Pugini	Executive Producer,Producer
David Pomier	Producer
Butch Robinson	Producer
Maurizio Argentieri	Sound Effects
Daniel Acon	Special Effects
Danilo Bollettini	Special Effects
Marco Corridori	Special Effects
Claudio Quaglietti	Special Effects
Franco Ragusa	Special Effects
Giorgio Antonini	Stunts
Marco Pancrazi	Stunts
Massimiliano Ubaldi	Stunts
Béatrice Kruger	Casting
Kim Taylor Coleman	Casting

Editorial Reviews

Despite Spike Lee's carefully cultivated reputation as a firebrand and provocateur, his films have always betrayed the heart of a classicist. Directing Miracle at St. Anna, the biggest-budgeted mainstream movie yet about the experiences of African-American soldiers in World War II, doesn't phase the audacious Lee in the slightest. He opens the film in 1983 with the main character watching John Wayne in The Longest Day and responding to the Duke's outsized American-ness with quiet pride (the flip side of Public Enemy's assault on him in "Fight the Power"). Lee addresses the ghosts of both American movies and American history throughout the film's two-hour-and-fourty-minute running time, but what makes the movie work is his commitment to traditional notions of story and character. Miracle at St. Anna is the opposite of a polemic, it's a generous, old-fashioned entertainment. Some long films feel bloated because the director deliberates over the grand themes, but Miracle at St. Anna clocks in at 160 minutes simply because, like a great beach novel, it's chock-full of story. The elaborate -- but never confusing -- plot involves a ghost, Italian resistance fighters, a love triangle, racial prejudice, war atrocities, and priceless artifacts. The movie adopts a novelistic approach where the sequences play like chapters that each develop the characters and the various storylines simultaneously, without once confusing or boring the audience. Screenwriter and novelist James McBride deserves credit for the elegant structure, but Lee and his editor can take a bow for giving each sequence weight without hampering the film's flow. Thankfully, every aspect of the production is as spot-on as the structure: Terence Blanchard's score alternates between aching beauty and martial intensity, Matthew Libatique's cinematography is varied and engrossing, and Lee's compositions continually showcase his innate ability to express sensuality -- the man knows how to photograph people. Everybody involved gets a moment to stand out, but none of the individual excellence announces itself with signs of "Look at how important all of this is!" pretentiousness. This is an unapologetically emotional, confident, and entertaining movie that is by turns funny, heartbreaking, shamelessly tearjerking, and nail-bitingly tense. The film could be mistaken for being nothing more than Oscar bait -- aggressively middle-brow fare that seems "important" simply because it tackles such weighty themes -- but Lee is far too idiosyncratic a filmmaker to strive for something as banal as that. Instead, Miracle at St. Anna feels exactly like the kind of film Spike Lee himself would enjoy watching, and the man does have excellent taste in movies.