Unbroken

I'm a Stare Contest Olympian, too

Unbroken

Grade: C +

Director: Angelina Jolie

Starring: Jack O’Connell, Garrett Hedlund, Domhnall Gleeson, Takamasa Ishihara and Finn Wittrock

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time 2 hr. 17 min.

The extraordinary true story at the heart of Unbroken, one that “must be told” according to the film’s ad slogan, is both its highest virtue and the albatross around its neck. The incredible life and times of Louis Zamperini (portrayed by Irish actor Jack O’Connell) is the sort of saga you couldn’t make into a movie unless it was bulwarked by truth. On the other hand, director Angelina Jolie hoists a hagiography that carefully traverses its phenomenal protagonist's Job-like tribulations, stepping lightly as if through a field of poppies it doesn’t want to tousle.

Popularized in a 2010 biography by author Laura Hillebrand, Zamperini’s odyssey begins with competing in the 5000-meter race in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where he places eighth but runs a blistering 56-second final lap. Following a linear line that the film eschews, Zamperini then joines the Army and, in 1942, survives being adrift for 47 days on a raft in the Pacific Ocean after his faulty B-24 crashed, killing eight of the 11 men aboard.

Barely subsisting off a diet of raw fish and rainwater, Zamperini fellow survivor Phil Phillips (Domhnall Gleeson) are eventually rescued/captured by the Japanese Navy. They are tortured for military information, and Zamperini is eventually transferred to a POW camp, where he spends two years being subjected to the sadistic whims of Mutsuhiro Watanabe (Miyavi, the Japanese pop star). Nicknamed “the Bird,” Watanabe uses his kendo stick to routinely beat Zamperini, and orders the weakened American to race Japanese guards for his amusement. After Zamperini refuses to become a radio turncoat for Japan, Watanabe lines up every prisoner in the camp and orders them to punch Zamperini in his face.

Zamperini’s courage is undeniable, and learning his remarkable story alone justifies seeing Unbroken. However, a visit to Wikipedia accomplishes the same goal, rendering Jolie’s biopic unwieldy and safe. The script is littered with easily recyclable platitudes like, “A moment of pain is worth a lifetime of glory,” and “If I can take it, I can make it,” which becomes the film’s anthem. The narrative is punctuated with flashbacks, most to Zamperini’s childhood in Torrence, Calif., where his Italian-American family’s experience with prejudice purportedly informed his steely resolve and forgiving disposition.

As if sensing the Oscar potential at play, Jolie concocts a esteemable stew of contributors—Roger Deakins’ provides the cinematography, William Goldenberg edits, the Coen brothers polish the script, Alexandre Desplat composes the ponderous score—whose prestigious yet disparate parts never coalesce into a cohesive whole.

Jolie deserves credit for acknowledging the role faith played in Zamperini’s survival (at one point promising to dedicate his life to God if he survives being lost at sea, a vow he eventually kept), But the director succumbs to turning her subject into a Christ-like figure, notably some heavy-handed Passion symbolism when Zamperini is forced to lift and hold a heavy wooden beam over his head for hours. Similarly, Jolie treats Zamperini and his fellow POWs—headlined by Garrett Hedlund—as a deified band of brothers, disciples devoid of any duplicity or hard edges; the closest we get is a glimpse of some GI Judases enjoying the good life in exchange for cooperating with Japanese propagandists.

Zamperini’s story is indeed one that must be told.  Unfortunately, Unbroken turns out to be a glossy echo chamber.

The Monuments Men

Does anybody know when Brad Pitt's

supposed to get here?

Grade: C +

Director: George Clooney

Starring: George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, Cate Blanchett, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Hugh Bonneville and Bob Balaban

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 58 min.

Originally slated for release in the heart of the December movie awards season, The Monuments Men was suddenly pushed into the February dump zone mere weeks before its scheduled opening. Considering the pedigree of its filmmakers and cast, the change was jarring and foreboding. The good news is that writer, director and star George Clooney’s latest vanity project is not the unadulterated disaster its release date portends. The bad news? The impetus for shifting that release date is patently clear.

Adapted by Clooney and longtime collaborator Grant Heslov from a book by Robert M. Edsel, the film tells the little-known true story of an Allied task force assigned to traverse the European theatre and save millions of pieces of art and other culturally significant items from the Nazis near the end of World War II, especially before their destruction on orders from Adolf Hitler.

Frank Stokes (Clooney), the leader of the squad, recruits a band of past-their-prime art experts. However, instead of an earnest, dramatic rendering of their mission and the motives of their adversaries, the breezy screenplay pairs its protagonists off in order to conjure subplots and kill screentime. So, John Goodman and Jean Dujardin play the ugly American and sophisticated Frenchman. Bill Murray and Bob Balaban carry on a dull Mutt & Jeff routine. And, George Clooney and Brit Hugh Bonneville are full of charm and charisma. Meanwhile, Matt Damon travels to Paris to woo information out of a wary former museum curator, played by Cate Blanchett.

Yes, it’s Ocean’s WWII, except that amid the wise-cracking homage to the homespun Hollywood war pictures of yesteryear, there are deaths and other deadly serious subject matter at hand that lend the film a tonal inconsistency. Clooney and Damon are charming enough, but Murray is virtually neutered. Meanwhile, Blanchett’s role is fatally uneven—one moment she’s aiding the French resistance, the next she’s inexplicably jailed for being a Nazi collaborator; she goes to tremendous lengths (including the offscreen death of her brother) to keep artwork from being removed by the Nazis, yet she tarries when the Americans ask for her help in retrieving it (presumably to chew up even more screentime).

Indeed, there are extended sequences that exist for seemingly no reason other than eating up the nearly two hour running time—other examples include Murray and Balaban’s nocturnal encounter with a young German soldier, and the squad’s slaphappy response after Damon’s character accidently stands on a landmine.

Ultimately, the actual race to retrieve the works of Rembrandt, Rubens and Rodin before the Nazis can torch them or the Ruskies can pilfer for themselves occupies the final act of the film. By then, The Monuments Men has mustered all the heft of a History Channel docudrama. That’s not all bad, especially if it awakens viewers young and old to the importance of classical art. But, a stroll through a gallery might accomplish the same thing and be twice as exciting.

Hyde Park on Hudson

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The Master

I'm Still Here...

Grade: B

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Laura Dern, Ambyr Childers and Jesse Plemons

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr. 17 min.

Of all the influences on Paul Thomas Anderson’s post-World War II American saga The Master, the life and times of L. Ron Hubbard ranks no higher than Upton Sinclair’s Oil! and tycoon Edward L. Doheny did on There Will Be Blood. While Anderson acknowledges using Hubbard as an inspiration for Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a shaman-cum-charlatan heading an Eisenhower-era spiritual movement called “The Cause,” don’t expect a roman à clef chronicling the birth and belief system of Scientology.

The Master’s central focus isn’t even the nature of personality cults, as in Martha Marcy May Marlene, though that’s certainly one of many undercurrents to this enigmatic epic. Instead, Anderson returns to familiar themes found throughout his short but resplendent filmography: the search for a father figure or lost son; dysfunctional family relationships; and flawed men fated to self-destruction.

The biggest surprise, however, is that The Master isn’t really Dodd’s story—indeed, the film’s title is a misnomer, referring not simply to Dodd but rather those things in everyone’s lives that preoccupy or even control them. Rather, the real protagonist is Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a sailor stationed in the Pacific Theater who spends his R-and-R humping anatomical sand castles and masturbating in the surf. Returning stateside and suffering from some unspecified emotional disorder, the dissipated Freddie’s only real passion is mixing bootleg liquor using darkroom chemicals, paint thinner, cleaning supplies and anything else at his disposal. When he loses a job as a department store portrait photographer fighting one of his many coifed, well-heeled subjects, he lashes out at an ideal he knows he’ll never appreciate or attain. After he’s chased away from work as a Steinbeck-ian cabbage picker, Freddie winds up a stowaway aboard a yacht being chartered by Dodd and a handful of his followers.

Dodd takes in the brutish Freddie, whom he likens to a fearful animal that eats its own excrement. However, it’s never clear whether the Master’s motives are altruistic, opportunistic or even sexual. Through a system of “processing”—undoubtedly modeled after Scientology’s “auditing”—Dodd seeks to exorcise Freddie’s demons and assimilate him into the fold.

Encased in atmospheric amber, The Master emulates the pace and palette of There Will Be Blood—if you splice Jonny Greenwood’s score for both, you couldn’t tell where one ends and the other begins. Although Blood is 20 minutes longer, theater viewers may exit The Master believing the opposite to be true. However, while Anderson’s oil epic was a character-driven allegory about Americanism and religion, the writer-director came to his newest project full of big ideas but became both enamored and distracted by his formidable actors along way.

Phoenix, appearing in his first film since the underappreciated I’m Still Here, gives an engrossing, awards-worthy performance. He compresses Freddie’s morass of rage, insecurity and anti-social behavior behind an inarticulate mumble, frozen sneer and graceless gait, a vessel that sometimes appears only vaguely human. Dodd—who describes himself as “a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher”—leans on charm and polish to peddle his mix of mysticism, science fiction and dime store psychology. But, he’s most revealing when Hoffman flashes an anxiety and anger simmering just below his well-scrubbed facade, such as when a naysayer challenges his dogma at a dinner party or a benefactor (Laura Dern) frets over a word change to a processing question made in Dodd’s second tome—through Hoffman, Dodd responds to this incident with irritation tinged with a vague surprise that anyone would notice, much less brood over such vagaries.

Together, Dodd and Freddie are two sides of the same animalistic coin—a scene in which they meet, physically and emotionally, in the middle of conjoining jail cells is unforgettable. Still, there’s only so many ways to (re)make this point. Anderson doesn’t pivot away from his two leads long enough to fully develop the many underwritten supporting characters, including Dodd’s biological son (Jesse Plemons) and daughter (Ambyr Childers), and his son-in-law (Rami Malek). Amy Adams is terrific as Peggy, Dodd’s wife, the power behind the throne who is part feminine ideal, part Lady Macbeth, but her performance becomes frustratingly one-note the more it plays second fiddle to Hoffman and Phoenix.

As a result, narrative opportunities are squandered. When the police show up to arrest Dodd, Anderson not only leaves viewers to assume Dodd is guilty of an unexplained financial grievance, he also wastes screen time show Freddie yet again fight someone (this time cops) that could have been used to elaborate on big ideas like a historical intolerance, sometimes hostility, by the government towards nontraditional faiths in a country that promises freedom of religion.

The one question The Master does lucidly pose is whether reforming the personality of a lout like Freddie is possible or even prudent. In so doing, Anderson—an avowed Stanley Kubrick devotee who reportedly filmed portions of The Master using the actual 65mm camera used to shoot 2001—has made his version of A Clockwork Orange. It’s a comparison underscored by such scenes as a dinner party in which Freddie visualizes all the ladies in attendance naked, and a final shot that I half expected to be accompanied by a voice over proclaiming, “I was cured all right.”

In one of the film’s more tedious montages, Dodd assigns Freddie an “application” that involves walking back and forth across a well-furnished room and finding different ways each time to describe the wood wall and windowpane he touches on either side. It’s an exercise not unlike watching The Master, a handsome canvas that’s open to interpretation, not explication.

Neil Morris

*Originally published at www.indyweek.com

Nanny McPhee Returns

If you can't say something nice about Audrey Hepburn,
don't say anything at all.

Grade: B –

Director: Susanna White

Starring: Emma Thompson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Rhys Ifans, Maggie Smith, Asa Butterfield, Bill Bailey, and Sam Kelly

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 1 hour, 49 minutes

When Nanny McPhee Returns to play governess for another harried English mother, the three children of Isabel Green (Maggie Gyllenhaal) are in the midst of fighting the Grays, their two snooty, city cousins. When the youngsters ignore McPhee’s (Emma Thompson) order to cease and desist, one thump of her magic walking stick sends the kids into self-harming convulsions. Two start pulling their own hair or ears; Megsie Green (Lil Woods) cannot stop banging her own head on the floor; Cyril Gray (Eros Vlahos) flips his body in repeated pratfalls; little Vincent Green (Oscar Steer) takes a wood paddle to the family crockery.

For all the later imagery of synchronized swimming piglets and rocket-powered motorbikes, this initial encounter is hard to shake. McPhee releases the children from her spell only after they beg and promise to stop misbehaving. The implication is that the children have gotten their just desserts; some might call it child abuse. Regardless, Isabel looks on in amazement when each child calmly marches off to bed, wishing her good night along the way. Deportment is an easy virtue to embrace when you’re afraid Nanny McPhee is going to make you gouge your own eyes out.

The snaggletooth deus ex machina drop by to help Isabel as she struggles raise her children, hold down a job, and save the family farm from her duplicitous brother-in-law (Rhys Ifans) while her husband is off fighting World War II. The look and structure of the film, like its predecessor, remains a cross between Roald Dahl and George Miller’s Babe films, although it does not duplicate the creativity of the former or the humanism of the latter.

CG renderings of baby elephants and acrobatic swine have the feel of a children’s storybook; not so much the flatulent cows and McPhee’s belching jackdaw. Indeed, the plodding plotline feels freest when McPhee, Cyril, and Norman Green (Asa Butterfield) escape the farm for a trip to the War Office to ascertain the condition of Norman’s father.

The cast is first-rate, particularly Thompson, Vlahos, Maggie Smith as Isabel’s seemingly daft employee Mrs. Docherty, and Ralph Fiennes’ brief cameo as a ramrod war commander and Cyril’s absentee father. Gyllenhaal, on the other hand, provides her usual overemoting and a put-on English accent as thick as the pig poo covering Isabel’s front yard.

While not as rewarding as its predecessor, Nanny McPhee Returns is a simple, unadorned fable that makes for easy family viewing. Still, the continuum of McPhee again swooping in to scare some manners into a gaggle of brats leaves you feeling like you’re not watching Mary Poppins-lite as much as an episode of Supernanny.

Neil Morris

Inglourious Basterds

I intern your milkshake

Grade: B

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Starring: Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Eli Roth, Diane Kruger, and Daniel Brühl

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hours, 32 minutes

To proclaim Inglourious Basterds is Quentin Tarantino’s fourth-best film (ahead of only the indulgent, indolent Death Proof) is not an insult, as each entry in this top quartet exceeds the finest production most directors will ever generate.

Still, the film’s relatively relegated status is interesting since Tarantino’s long-rumored World War II flick has been a pet project dating back to his immediate post-Pulp Fiction years. Like all Tarantino movies, Basterds is largely homage, principally – says the director – as a “spaghetti western but with World War II iconography.” There are also overt allusions to so-called “macaroni combat” flicks – the Italian exploitation war movies of the 1960s, 70s and 80s – as well as French New Wave cinema.

Of course, there is also Tarantino’s distinctive pulpy, madcap mayhem buttressed by an underlying, underrated maturity. Few filmmakers are afforded the latitude Tarantino enjoys to methodically develop scenes and storylines. This freedom sometimes leads to sequences that are rudderless, drifting on with no discernible payoff. However, it also produces gems like the opening, 20-minute long “Chapter One” of Basterds. Armed only with guile and a glass of milk, SS Col. Hans Landa, played sensationally by Austrian actor Christoph Waltz in an Oscar-caliber performance, interrogates a French dairy farmer suspected of harboring Jews. The scene reinforces Tarantino’s affinity for Sergio Leone, and it also crackles with QT’s trademark visual and dialogue flourishes. Unlike most filmmakers, the excitement and tension in a Tarantino film largely derives from the fact that you never know how any particular scene will end, and Basterds is no exception.

After the opening act, we are then introduced to the key players for the rest of the interwoven storyline. First is Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), a thickly accented Tennessee hillbilly leading a motley crew of eight Jewish American soldiers nicknamed the “Basterds,” whose mission is to comp the European countryside looking to kill and scalp “Nat-zzies.” Later, we meet a Jewish woman going by the name of Emmanuelle Mimieux (Mélanie Laurent), the proprietress of a Parisian cinema that is forced to play German films by Leni Riefenstahl and G.W. Pabst. (In one of the film’s more memorable lines, Mimieux explains that she displays the names of filmmakers on the theater’s marquee because “In France, we revere our directors.”)

In typical Tarantino fashion, these diffuse plotlines gradually intersect around a blazing, bombastic finale set around the premiere of the latest Nazi propaganda film by Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth), called A Nation’s Pride, which dramatizes on the heroic exploits of a German soldier (Daniel Brühl) who also harbors affections for Mimieux. QT’s love of cinema is the principal sidelight in Bastards, with characters who provide a virtual audio tour through early 20^th century Weimar cinema.

As in his previous works, Tarantino wrings tension out of the clash of characters with varying class and cultural backgrounds. He distills World War II into one giant race war (not without basis) and takes a baseball bat to Hitler’s vision of the “master race” with irony and volume by conjuring a conspicuously multiculti milieu. American soldiers impersonate Italians; a British lieutenant and film buff (Michael Fassbender) plays a German officer; Mimieux is a Jew masquerading as a Frenchwoman whose lover is her African projectionist. Aldo himself claims to be part-Apache Indian, and the Basterds end up adopting guerilla tactics patterned after Native Americans. Even in the epic opening scene, Landa starts out speaking in French until he and the Gallic farmer compromise by communicating in English.

Of course, the vehicle for all this would-be social commentary is a violent, rollicking fever-dream. And, yes, Tarantino’s nearly unchecked filmmaking freedom again manifests itself in occasional self-indulgence, particularly his infatuation with the sound of his scripts – Aldo acts as Tarantino’s mouthpiece during the film’s anticlimactic coda, declaring that his latest bit of sadistic handiwork “just might be my masterpiece.”

Thankfully, the grotesque use of the Holocaust as a justification for stylized revenge and Tarantino’s brand of comic brutality is largely confined to the film’s second chapter and its misleading trailers. Inglourious Basterds is audacious, entertaining, uneven, and imaginary. It is no “masterpiece,” but it’s far from inglorious.

Neil Morris

Valkyrie

Pirates of the Aryan

Grade: B

Director: Bryan Singer

Starring: Tom Cruise, Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Terence Stamp, Eddie Izzard, Kevin McNally, and Christian Berkel

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hours

In war, the difference between courage and treachery often lies along the dividing line between victory and defeat. Substitute a triumph by the Confederacy during the American Civil War and history books would treat the acts of John Wilkes Booth and his cadre of co-conspirators to assassinate Abraham Lincoln and topple the upper rungs of the U.S. government as daring blows for liberty landed against a tyrannical foe.

That Adolph Hitler was a ruthless, murderous madman is beyond dispute. Yet, he also inspired millions of Germans as their leader and marched them into worldwide war. In Valkyrie, director Bryan Singer assumes that audiences will automatically embrace the virtue behind the true story of a group of German soldiers who carried out a plan to kill Hitler and topple the Schutzstaffel during “July 20 plot” of 1944. Branded as traitors at the time, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators are memorialized today as heroes, in Germany and abroad.

Yet, while the righteousness of their purpose seems obvious in retrospect, the path of how political and military leaders who swore an allegiance to their country and its Führer came to rebel against them deserves more than a passing presumption. Instead, Singer – directing his third foray into Nazi subject-matter (Apt Pupil and the X-Men prologue) – drops us squarely into the plot’s planning stages, eschewing any examination of the plotters’ motives, including, for example, the belief by some in the old guard that, with Hitler gone, Germany could join with the Western allies to stem the Bolshevik tide sweeping in from the Soviet Union.

Already harboring doubts about Hitler, Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise) loses a hand, two fingers, and his left eye on the battlefields of North Africa. Afterwards, he takes a series of posts in Berlin that position him closer to Hitler in preparation for the assassination attempt. From there, Singer delves into the cloak-and-dagger intrigue behind the plot’s planning and execution, from developing the means and opportunity to kill Hitler to insuring the coup d’état’s success during the chaotic aftermath.

Illustrating the procedural aspects of the plot is where Valkyrie shines, thanks to Singer’s finely tuned pacing and lavish production values. Much of the filming took place on location in Germany, including rare permission from the government to shoot at the Bendlerblock, a historic locale crucial to the story. Even Tom Cruise’s ill-fitting American accent, the subject of much preproduction press, gets forgotten amid the actor’s trademark intensity and a coterie of British actors – Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, Terence Stamp, Kevin McNally, and Tom Wilkinson – giving their crisp, buttoned-up best in key supporting roles.

What’s missing, however, is sufficient motive for these stolid, conservative officers to break so radically with military tradition; such a ‘why’ would compliment Singer’s glossy rendering the plot’s intricate ‘how.’ Still, Valkyrie maintains its momentum without feeling rushed, and the story remains taut despite its foregone outcome.

Neil Morris

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Grade: C

Director: Mark Herman

Starring: Asa Butterfield, Vera Farmiga, David Thewlis, Amber Beattie, Jack Scanlon, and Rupert Friend

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 33 minutes

To quote a fellow film critic, the first thing I thought at the start of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas was, “Uh oh, this is another Nazi movie.” However, the film’s unique perspective temporarily assuaged my fears that this was, to be even more specific, “another Holocaust movie.” 

Bruno (Asa Butterfield) is the 8-year-old son of the Nazi Commandant (David Thewlis) overseeing a Jewish concentration camp (the camp’s layout suggests it is Auschwitz). Bruno and his family, including his mother (Vera Farmiga) and 12-year-old sister, relocate from their opulent Berlin mansion to a spacious but spartan residence near the camp. From his upstairs bedroom, Bruno can spy in the distance what he calls “the farm” and its workers, who always wear what appear to him to be striped pajamas (their prisoner clothing). 

Bruno’s quest for adventure eventually leads him through the forest surrounding the estate to the electrified perimeter enclosing the camp, where meets Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), a young Jewish boy held captive inside. The two become unlikely friends, with Bruno bringing Shmuel food, playing checkers with him, and gaining veiled insight about the truth of his father’s work. 

Adapted from John Boyce’s novel of the same name, the film’s strengths derive from the power of the unseen acting in concert with the audience’s prescience about the setting’s underlying horrors, not unlike Louis Malle’s Au Revoir les Enfants. There is a subtle power channeled through Bruno’s naiveté, like when he wonders why the smoke bellowing from the camp’s chimneys smells so foul or when he asks an elderly Jew serving in the family home why he would give up being a doctor to take a job peeling potatoes. Even the fact that the actors speak using English accents instead of the stigmatized clipped German brogue typical in films of this ilk lures Western viewers into assessing the humanity of people complicit, blindly or otherwise, in the most inhumane acts. Writer-director Mark Herman (Little Voice) mostly crafts a daedal, affecting fable about a much-chronicled tragedy. 

But, then comes the ending. As the final act unfolds, you sit in your seat with mouth agape, shocked at not just the final plot turn – and hoping it takes a sudden detour – but also the thought processes of those who believed it to be a sensible, emotionally justifiable course to take. It is overwrought, illogical, and betrays the thoughtfulness of the rest of the film. In attempting to exact perverse retribution, Boyce and Herman alienate their target audience while inadvertently accomplishing the singular feat of conjuring a modicum of sympathy for a brutal Nazi murderer. 

In the recent Hollywood satire What Just Happened, a film project becomes embattled after test audiences assail the movie’s climax, during which gun-toting goons, just before killing the hero, first shoot a dog in the head. In The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, metaphorically speaking, the puppy gets shot in the head. 

Neil Morris

Miracle at St. Anna

Sir, can't you see this has sitcom written all over it?

Grade: D –

Director: Spike Lee

Starring: Derek Luke, Michael Early, Laz Alonso, Omar Benson Miller, Pierfrancesco Favino, Valentina Favino, and Matteo Sciabordi

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hour, 40 minutes

There is no doubting the high-minded and long-overdue goal of Spike Lee to pay adequate cinematic homage to the contributions of African-American soldiers during World War II, who fought bravely to protect their country and preserve freedoms they were not even allowed to enjoy. However, the sad truth is that if it had been made by anyone other than Lee, Miracle at St. Anna would be roundly ridiculed and dismissed as a hyper-reductive, racist rant. Written with the sophistication of a Robert Benigni script, this World War II epic failure trades in equal-opportunity stereotyping: all whites are single-minded bigots; blacks alternate between buffoons, oversexed, and/or blinded by uncontrollable violent rage; Italians are histrionic and hot-blooded; etc. At one point, a redneck Army officer (and in Lee’s world, there isn’t any other kind) exclaims, “What is this, a minstrel show?!” Startlingly, I was already asking myself the same question.

Betraying that Lee seems guided more by an impulse to settle a score with Hollywood’s traditional, whites-only depiction of WWII, he opens the film in 1983 with an elderly African-American sitting at home in front of the TV, muttering angry epitaphs at John Wayne’s war pic, The Longest Day. That man, postal clerk Hector Negron (Laz Alonso), later guns down a man who tries to buy some stamps. The question of how Hector was able to keep a loaded Luger concealed behind his post office window for years is never answered. The mystery over why Hector shot the man and why Hector has a priceless statue head pilfered from Florence, Italy decades ago forms the uneasy foundation for the rest of the film.

Rewind back to 1944 and the 92^nd Infantry’s “Buffalo Soldiers,” an all-black unit patrolling the Italian countryside. Four members of the company – Hector, dutiful Staff Sgt. Aubrey Stamps (Derek Luke), profane horndog Bishop Cummings (Michael Early), and the rotund Private Sam Train (Omar Benson Miller) – find themselves trapped behind enemy lines and forced to hold-up in a tiny Tuscan village.

Along the way, Train, who lugs around the aforementioned statue head everywhere he goes as his personal good luck charm (without explaining how this does not interfere with transport and miles of humping through the European war theater), rescues and semi-adopts an Italian, seemingly magical moppet. There is are extended subplots involving the Italian Resistance, a comely Italian sexpot (Pierfrancesco Favino), and lots of snarling Germans, whose every appearance is accompanied by the sort of brass crescendo normally reserved for James Bond villains. Lee even manages to squeeze in, via flashback to basic training in Louisiana, the de rigueur scene in which some Bayou bigot refuses to serve the black soldiers in his restaurant, followed quickly Lee’s shout-out to contemporary, hip-hop era audience when the soldiers’ return armed with hilt to force the soda jerk to fork over some forbidden ice cream sundaes.

James McBride’s lunkheaded screenplay, adapted from his own novel, is as tone-deaf as it is insulting, reducing the whole of WWII to an extension of America’s race war. Good actors are made to look ridiculous, spouting dialogue filled with non sequiturs, clichés, and era-inappropriate slang; Miller, in particular, plays the sort of Bagger Vance/Green Mile magical Negro Lee would rail against were it in any movie other than his own. Even the numerous battle scenes are staged haphazardly, revealing that no director, even an accomplished one, can just pick-up a camera and shoot a war movie. Through it all, Terence Blanchard’s nail-on-a-chalkboard orchestration is more grating, intrusive, and incongruous than ever, plodding its way through scenes it is suppose to compliment.

The end result is a bloated, meandering misfire that is as unbearable after 20 minutes as it is by the end of its unfathomable 2 hours and 40 minutes running time. When it comes to issues of race, Lee has always been a welcome one-man wrecking machine. In Miracle at St. Anna, the problem is he doesn’t know when to take his foot off the gas.

Neil Morris