Miracle at St. Anna (2008)

At the beginning of “Miracle at St. Anna” an old man sits in his apartment watching a movie on his black-and-white television set. The film is “The Longest Day,” the sprawling 1962 World War II drama starring John Wayne and nearly every other white movie star of the era, and it provokes a bitter reaction. “We served our country too,” says the viewer, a postal worker and Army veteran named Hector Negron.At the beginning of “Miracle at St. Anna” an old man sits in his apartment watching a movie on his black-and-white television set. The film is “The Longest Day,” the sprawling 1962 World War II drama starring John Wayne and nearly every other white movie star of the era, and it provokes a bitter reaction. “We served our country too,” says the viewer, a postal worker and Army veteran named Hector Negron.

“Miracle at St. Anna,” directed by Spike Lee and based on a novel by James McBride, who wrote the screenplay, exists in part to make the obvious, overdue point that men like Hector (Laz Alonso) — Latino and in particular African-American soldiers — fought as bravely and as hard as the characters in those Hollywood combat epics. But setting the record straight after so many years and so many movies is not necessarily a simple undertaking, and this film sometimes stumbles under its heavy, self-imposed burden of historical significance.

Like the French director Rachid Bouchareb, whose “Days of Glory” followed Arab soldiers fighting for France against the Nazis, Mr. Lee sticks to the sturdy conventions of the infantry movie, adapting old-fashioned techniques to an unfamiliar, neglected story. And the cinematic traditionalism of “Miracle at St. Anna” is perhaps its most satisfying trait. At its best, this is a platoon picture, and if it’s not exactly like the ones Hollywood made in the late ’50s and early ’60s, that’s part of Mr. Lee’s argument: it’s the movie someone should have had the guts or the vision to make back then. Better late than never.

It should not be surprising that “Miracle at St. Anna” is occasionally corny and didactic. Every now and then, the action slows down to make time for a speech or a carefully staged argument about racial injustice. But if you’re tempted to roll your eyes, recall that such speeches — on the subjects of liberty and democracy and the mortal threat to those ideals posed by Hitler and his army — have always been a staple of all but the most hardboiled and cynical World War II movies. And in this one, as in “Days of Glory,” the high-minded talk and theme-announcing scenes illuminate a thorny and crucial paradox, namely that the countries fighting against totalitarian race-hatred had some serious race problems of their own.