Okay, here's my ruminatant...moist cud spit for your inspection. That America is more tribalized than ever is axiomatic. The Sarah Palin white folks. Tyler Perry bamas (opposite sides of the same...er...coin). The former being the majority, don't look for EA's Call of Duty to incorporate a story line about black combat troops led in segregated units by incompetent, indifferent or outright racist officers into suicide missions. Or Nisei, for that matter--thrust into the most hellish of battles while their families are locked up in our own former Guantanmo, the "Internment camps" of Arizona. Call of Duty's still locked into the mythology that D-Day was the holy battle that decided WWII, when every day on the Russian Front and in the Pacific was Normandy. And thus...
Check the comments on Spike Lee on imdb.com and tell me the average white filmgoer "gets" him. Is that is own fault? Yes and no. Spike bought the rights to the deep and bitter sweet and unassuming novel by James McBride, my historical novel role model (since Michener's dead), Miracle at St. Anna. Yes, there's a lot of usual Spike preachyness and heavy-handed allegory...ego, lack of editing. But hey, he's Spike and James was likely so happy to be coopted by Hollywood, well, you know the story. And while Spike's attack on Clint Eastwood vis. Flags of Our Fathers was yet another indication that he's still got his head up his narrow ass, I'll say this time, he had the balls and credibility to back it, primarily because no one has ever addressed this aspect of our history. Yeah, there's a taste here in there in mawkish films like Glory, or underfunded, poorly written and acted (but for Danny Glover) crap like Buffalo Soldiers. White people don't like to viddy this schizophrenia that is America, especially when it comes to African Americans and this nation's wars. Clint touched on it in Flags by showing meek Pullman porters tending to the manufactured celebrities of Mt. Suribachi, and perhaps that what set off Spike's big mouth. Not Clint's intent to be superficial. Hardly. But he could have addressed this stuff as, for example, Spike did deftly (deft isn't often used with regard to Spike, who usually smacks you across the face) with a short scene. 70 year old Hector Negron silently watches John Wayne in the D-Day epic The Longest Day in all the Duke's cheezy patriotic mythic whatever-adjective -your -ass wants to add persona.
But there's vintage Spike in the rest of this film as he tackles these themes: religion as a function of individual sacrifice, redemption, love rather than tribal dogma. The racism of America versus that of the Third Reich. This dude is the only filmmaker in America who can be genius and annoying simultaneously. Yet these themes are reality based. German POWs welcomed in a Southern town's ice cream shop whilst black GIs are threatened at gunpoint, for example. But there are amazing craft points presented which you'd have never thought possible if you're as old as me and remember going to see She's Gotta have It on a Friday date with a silly girl. Lush cinematography. Complex subtitled scenes with Tuscan villagers, Italian partisans, an old strega (an Italian witch) and of course Germans (nice touch using Max Malestesta and Alexandra Maria Lara from my favorite Hitler flick, Downfall...with the beautiful and pouty Alexandra as "Axis Sally," exhorting black soldiers to throw down their guns "and dance," eat fried chicken and greens in her propaganda broadcasts). Things like that. I was impressed. I bet Clint is, so's Spielberg. The contemporary scenes (ca. 1983 per the book's plot) are much better, grittier and tighter (okay--due again to the book's plot) and less pat-syrup than anything from the look-at-the-old-men-as granddads now arcs in Flags or Private Ryan. Okay, maybe the last ten minutes are way to tear-jerking and fake, but hey...
The performances carry the flick when the over the top Spike Lee-ness over- or underwhelms you. Laz Alonso, Derek Luke and about three other dudes ...lord they are channeling Denzel in various persona, at various times in Denzel's career. And that's a good thing. Homage, fune-tuning, not imitation. Ex-Halle Berry beau Michael Ely is amazing. Omar Benson Miller as Train, the "Chocolate Giant" in the horror-addled fantasy of a little Italian boy, is out- Forrest Whittakering Forrest himself. Again I say imitation as homage, not copying, and pantomime, and his is about as close to McBride's vision in the novel as any character's. Yeah, there's Italian T & A (with Ely and buttery-bodied Valentina Cervi getting busy). Some anachronistic language. A view factual lapses (i.e. the 92nd Inf. wasn't a "liberal" experiment but rather the consolidation of venerable Buffalo Soldier regiments dating back to the end of the Civil War; the Germans along the Serchio River were crack parachute troops and panzergrenadiers who're veterans of North Africa, Sicily, even the Russian Front--not mud-humping greenhorn conscripts).
And then there's the 1944 Sant'Anna di Stazzema massacre. Here Spike shows you just how he's as much as auteur and master as any in our American pantheon of Scorsese, Spielberg, Jewison, Altman et al. Yeah, I said it. Hate him if you must, but give the little devil his due. And I say pantheon because once you remove comedy directors like Judd Aptow and Ben Stiller from the mix (and they are getting annoying too, despite Tropic Thunder), all you have is the rest of the clowns who think they are directing music vidoes or computer games like Tour of Duty. World War Two, at it's most terrible, unfolds in forty seconds as the SS murders babies, children, grandparents. Sorry, angry right wing New York Jews--I'd bet your nemesis Spike could do justice to a gut-wrenching Holocaust film, or something on the 1948 War in Palestine. Hell, maybe remake Exodus...
...but there'd be no Exodus without Paul Newman. And that's the next story...
