From left, Matteo Sciabordi, Omar Benson Miller, Michael Ealy, Derek Luke and Laz Alonso in Miracle at St. Anna, about four black American soldiers stationed in Tuscany, Italy, during World War II.

TOUCHSTONE PICTURES

It’s clear to see why Spike Lee chose to make the screen version of James McBride’s novel, Miracle at St. Anna.

The plot revolves around four heroic African-American soldiers who are trapped behind Nazi lines in the Italian countryside during World War II. Black soldiers serving Uncle Sam during that war are vastly underrepresented in movies. Indeed, Lee made headlines in June when he publicly chastised Clint Eastwood for not including a single African-American in his two-part Iwo Jima saga, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, even though hundreds of blacks took part in the bloody battle. At the start of Miracle at St. Anna, Lee underscores the long-ignored contributions of black soldiers by Hollywood, showing a scene from a John Wayne wartime film that’s set in Italy, but with only white faces among the troops.

But emotional fervor seems to have gotten in the way of Lee’s storytelling techniques in Miracle at St. Anna, which could have used more judicious editing. Working from a screenplay by McBride himself (always a risky proposition since authors are often reluctant to pare down their books for the screen), the film is simply too long, at 2 1/2 hours. After the initial setup, which has the soldiers ambushed by the Nazis, separated from their squad and discovering an 8-year-old Italian boy hiding in a barn, the film slows considerably. There’s a lot of back and forth about the boy among the soldiers, as well as with villagers who live nearby in the hamlet of St. Anna, all of whom profess to know nothing about the child or what to do with him.

Miracle at St. Anna suffers from too many characters and too many subplots. Most of them eventually collide, but not soon enough. There’s much interaction between the soldiers about how to get out of their predicament of being behind enemy lines. There’s interaction between them and the villagers. There’s a subplot revolving around an anti-Fascist partisan and members of his resistance fighter group. There are the Nazis, who have been ordered to find the missing boy as well as an AWOL German soldier, both of whom know too much about a massacre carried out in a churchyard. Hitler himself wants them found, the Nazi officer is told by his commander. Much of this is carried out in Italian or German with English subtitles for authenticity’s sake, but the subtitles could annoy some audience members. The film almost plays like an art-house movie, although there’s a lot of extremely graphic violence.

Lee begins the film strongly, however, in a shocking moment that leaves one character dead at the hands of a seemingly mild-mannered man. The film then turns into a mystery. In the killer’s closet the police discover a long-missing bust of a goddess taken from a ruined bridge in Florence, Italy. Soon afterward, a newspaper with a front-page account of the killing and the bust is tossed from a window in Rome, landing on the table of a man in a café below who is alarmed by the story and then begins running down the street in a panic. Surely he will turn up later somehow, McBride’s script being nothing if not contrived. But then we cut to the killer’s interrogation from which the flashback story unfolds.

Part of the film’s mystery revolves around the boy who is found and sort of adopted by Private Sam Train (Omar Benson Miller), a big-hearted bear of a man who becomes his guardian angel. But who is the boy? Why is he alone? And what are the villagers hiding? These things get swallowed up for too long in the script’s complexities.

Lee has staged two extraordinarily graphic violent moments that may turn people off. The first, which finally explains the mystery of the boy, may leave one feeling numb. The second, near the end of the film, revolves around a firefight in the streets of the village of St. Anna as the Nazis close in on the four black soldiers and the streets run red. Unfortunately, this sequence is played so over the top that it overwhelms the story. When a character one assumed was dead turns up seemingly very much alive and another, who one thought was probably dead, has a resurrection moment, it tests not only one’s belief, but one’s goodwill as well.

The racial issue is raised several times throughout the film in very heavy-handed ways. Lee has often touched on racial issues in his films, from Do the Right Thing to Malcolm X and beyond. But in Miracle at St. Anna he tackles it with the gloves off. The white squad commander (D.B. Sweeney) is a redneck who clearly feels blacks are inferior and is very condescending toward them. The Nazis loudly broadcast the radio screed of Axis Sally from Berlin, calling on the black soldiers to give up the fight because they are second-class citizens in their own land. There’s also a flashback, from out of nowhere, in which the black soldiers are ordered out of a whites-only diner in the American South, only to come back later for retribution. These things overly dramatize a situation that needs to be addressed, but not in such a ham-fisted way.

**Miracle at St. Anna

Starring: Derek Luke, Michael Ealy, Laz Alonso, Omar Benson Miller, Pierfrancesco Favino, Vanentina Cervi, Matteo Sciabordi. In English and in Italian, German and Spanish with English subtitles.

Rated: R, contains graphic war violence, profanity, sexual situations, brief nudity.

mjanuson@projo.com