In an interview posted on YouTube the character actor Omar Benson Miller talks about his roles in two back-to-back high-profile movies coming out this fall. “I’m turning it up,” he says. “It’s time to explode!” Given Mr. Miller’s outstanding work in the earlier film, Spike Lee’s World War II drama, “Miracle at St. Anna” (Sept. 26), he may not have to wait until the second — Gary Fleder’s “Express” (Oct. 3), about Ernie Davis, the first black football player to win the Heisman Trophy — for his career to become airborne.
The first World War II feature film devoted to the experience of some of the 900,000 or so black military personnel who served, Mr. Lee’s “Miracle” follows four soldiers from the all-black 92nd Division who become separated from their company and hole up in a partisan-controlled Italian village behind German lines. Along the way and under mortar fire, Mr. Miller’s Pvt. Sam Train laboriously rescues a small, injured Italian boy who, gazing at him in wonder, calls him “the chocolate giant.”
Round-faced, heavyset and 6 feet 6 inches tall, Mr. Miller (above, with Matteo Sciabordi) looks a lot younger than his 29 years. He plays Train stolid and straight-faced, but with a touch of old-fashioned comedy, gasping wide-eyed when the shooting starts and talking excitedly in a high, husky voice when silence would be more prudent. Train also carries around a heavy marble head he has salvaged, rubbing it frequently for good luck. Yet as Mr. Miller gradually reveals, he towers over his companions in more ways than one.
The fool he plays is of the holy variety: mystical, superstitious and, his eyes saying it all, silently shocked by the violence around him. Train fights as he must, but he seems least like any army’s soldier and most like his own man, his naïveté hardened by war into an indestructible innocence. As danger closes in on this little band of brothers, it’s his life the viewer worries about the most.
Da The New York Times, 7 Settembre 2008
