Spike goes

Having recently had his biggest commercial success to date with the clever heist thriller “Inside Man,” Spike Lee turns his attention to another classic genre, the war film — subgenre, Group of Soldiers Trapped Behind Enemy Lines, Trying to Fulfill Mission and Make It Back to Base. In a way, “Miracle at St. Anna” is the African-American “Saving Private Ryan.” Nonetheless, it’s surprising to see the ways — good and bad —Steven Spielberg’s aesthetics seem to have influenced Lee.

The first 15 minutes set up a framing device for the body of the film: It’s 1983, and elderly postal clerk Hector Negron (Laz Alonso, in better-than-usual old age makeup), nearing retirement, has shot an old man to death in the middle of the post office for no apparent reason. An eager young reporter (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) convinces a hardboiled police detective (John Turturro) to let him tag along with a pair of cops as they search Negron’s apartment.

Amidst the typical belongings of an aging working-class widower, they find the battered head of a statue — a missing relic so valuable that its discovery makes headlines across the ocean. In a sequence right out of a screwball comedy, the girlfriend of an American (John Leguizamo) in Rome tosses the newspaper out the window and right in front of a middle-aged Italian man, for whom the news is so important that he drops his double espresso in emphatic slow motion. (Don’t have any false expectations from the casting of these scenes: of Gordon-Levitt, Turturro and Leguizamo, only the first ever reappears, and briefly, at that.)

All of this then yields to the World War II flashback that makes up 130 of the movie’s 160 minutes. It’s 1944 and Negron is part of the all-black 92nd Division, fighting the Nazis for control of Italy.

When most of his company is massacred — thanks to the truculence of a racist officer who refuses to believe the colored boys could have achieved their reported position — Negron and three others manage to escape and make their way to a small Tuscan village. Stamps (Derek Luke) is the no-nonsense ranking sergeant; Bishop (Michael Ealy) is a cynical womanizer/hustler; and Train (Omar Benson Miller) is a huge, seemingly slow-witted private.

Maybe “simple” is a better word for Train; he may be the least educated and (in most senses) least intelligent of the group, but he’s the spiritual heart. It’s Train who rescues 8-year-old orphan Angelo (Matteo Sciabordi), insists on taking him along, and even figures out how to communicate with him, despite having no common language.

It’s tempting to say that Train is the film’s protagonist, but Lee opts for a constantly shifting POV. Most often, the story seems to “belong” to Negron because of the way the framing device is used; most logically, these would be his memories, though there are many scenes included that he is not privy to. Perhaps it’s wrong to consider the 1944 material a “flashback” per se, which implies a connection to an individual POV. (On the other hand, the story being recounted in memory would at least provide an excuse for the probably anachronistic use of “bail,” in the sense of “leave,” and the certainly anachronistic use of “book” in the same sense.)

In fact, Lee frequently cuts to discussions among Nazi officers, among American officers, among Partisan resistance fighters, and among the townspeople. As in the classic war epics of an earlier era, he’s going for scope, even though the bulk of the drama transpires on a more intimate level. This approach only seems incongruous because of the framing story.

Lee is a film-school grad, so it’s not surprising to see echoes of King Vidor’s great silent “The Big Parade,” in the very first World War II sequence; nor is it surprising to be reminded of any number of Sam Fuller films. But, most noticeably, “Miracle at St. Anna” appears to be designed as a criticism of, or corrective to, Clint Eastwood’s two 2006 Iwo Jima films — “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters from Iwo Jima” — which Lee famously dissed for ignoring black soldiers.

Even if the project was in the works before those films came out, the very first sequence invites the comparison. We see a clip from “The Longest Day,” Darryl F. Zanuck’s 1962 megaproduction about D-day, playing on TV, with John Wayne — from whom Eastwood inherited the mantle of Greatest All-American Action Icon — addressing his men. The camera pulls back to reveal the aged Negron, as he voices the same complaint about the exclusion of blacks from the cultural history of the war.

Eastwood and Lee have both made some great films ... even the greatest of which usually include a scene or two at which I cringe. In “Miracle at St. Anna,” the big cringer is the very last sequence, which is tear-jerking and overly explicit, in the worst Spielberg manner. There is a big reveal at the end that anyone paying the least attention understands before it is explained. Even more to the point, the body of the film has established a less direct device that could make things clear to anyone not paying attention. But, instead of employing that device — which would have been several magnitudes more moving — Lee has the characters explicitly state what’s going on. It suggests a distrust of the audience’s intelligence, and it blunts the impact.

Even more in the Spielberg mode is the use of music. Terence Blanchard’s orchestral score is alternately effective and overbearing. In the first battle scene, its minimalist repetition manages to ratchet the tension higher, one teeny increment after another. At other times, it amplifies emotions that need no amplification. Fuller would never have done this, although, to be fair, Fuller tended to underuse music to highlight the dialogue.

Which is not to say Lee and screenwriter/novelist James McBride don’t get talky now and then. They’ve included a number of discussions and arguments about racism. But, again, these are a form of overkill; the movie is full of scenes that show degrees of racism and the varying reactions of the characters. And showing is, as always, more effective than telling, particularly in a movie that’s already two hours and 40 minutes long.

Like some Eastwood and Spielberg films, the length seems designed to convey an extra sense of thematic heaviness, of gravitas; like them, it might have been easily trimmed by a half hour — something I've never felt about a Lee movie before. It’s a shame, because there are so many good moments buried in there — a proverbial two-hour struggling to get out.