The watch test"" is the simple critical technique we are all guilty of in the post-""Lord of the Rings"" three-hour filmmaking era. If you check your watch before a movie reaches the climax of its story arc, the film isn't engaging enough for you to immerse yourself in the story, characters and cinematic imagery.
For all its beauty and detail, Spike Lee's World War II opus ""The Miracle at St. Anna"" cannot escape this snap judgment, leaving audiences with a pile of detailed characters, heavy racial themes and excess running time that provokes some thought but never gels together to form the grand epic Lee wanted.
Perhaps the problem is that the story Lee tries to tell is just too big. He begins in the 1980s as Hector Negron (Laz Alonso) shoots a strange man in cold blood with a Nazi-era Luger pistol. Pressed for a motive, or a reason why he has a severed head of an Italian statue in his closet, Hector finally mutters, ""I know the Sleeping Man."" The film flashes back to Hector's platoon, a rag-tag group of black soldiers who save a young Italian boy from the frontlines between German and American troops. They get separated from their regiment, Buffalo Squad, and trapped behind enemy lines in an Italian village. After about two hours of plot-free characterization, the soldiers eventually have to fight their way out.
Explaining what this ""Saving Private Ryan"" soldier's tale has to do with Negron's murder, the sleeping man and the severed head would take another 2000 words. There is no economy in this story - every detail, however trivial and irrelevant to the central narrative, gets 20 minutes of screen time. The sheer amount of back-story required to make the huge cast of characters seem relevant numbs the audience until they lose any concern whether the characters live or die.
There are definitely some standout scenes. Our first encounter with Buffalo Squad has them slowly creeping across a quiet field toward an invisible enemy. The silence is broken by Axis Sally, a Nazi woman blasting rhetoric of racial hatred across the battlefield to raise the troops to riot against their white commanders. ""The white man is safe at home, sleeping with your wives and sisters while you fight his war."" Unshaken, the soldiers fight bravely through fire lines, only to have their calls for artillery ignored.
The film is steeped in this racial tension, heavy-handed but definitely noteworthy. Black soldiers, like Italians fearing for their families, are just people caught up in the middle of a war whose instigators seem detached from the blood on their hands. Their disillusionment would be the ignition of the civil rights movement, their frustration a drive for change.
It's a hard film to recommend because the story is so convoluted, but if you are a fan of Spike Lee you may enjoy the racial politics of war that he brings to light.
Grade: C
