Miracle
With Kurt Russell, Patricia Clarkson, Noah Emmerich, Eddie Cahill, Michael Mantenuto, and Nathan West.
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If you’re in the movie’s target audience of children and young teens it may have, but I don’t feel any great need to wrap myself in the flag over a 24-year-old hockey game, especially now that the Soviet Union is history and the U.S. has its own dubious track record in Afghanistan. The film uses President Carter’s long-reviled “malaise speech” to provide a moment of inspiration and illumination–you’d never guess that Carter was trying to get Americans to conserve petroleum–and it settles into wallpaper jingoism, with an incessant sound track of portentous music and crowds chanting “USA! USA!” If you can tolerate all this phony uplift you’ll also get a pretty interesting story about a shrewd Minnesota college coach named Herb Brooks (Kurt Russell) who developed a more international style of hockey with a handpicked roster of young nonprofessionals and defeated the most feared team in the world.
He was a merciless taskmaster. After the team lost to Norway he embarrassed his players by keeping them out on the ice for 45 minutes of skating exercises as the spectators filed out, an incident pumped for high drama by the movie: Russell chews gum and fumes as he overhears two players discussing women while their team loses. After the game he enlists his assistant coach, Craig Patrick (sensitively played by Noah Emmerich), to blow the whistle for him in the prolonged torture session punctuated with angry homilies, which continues after the rink custodian has shut off the lights and the players are doubled over on the ice. It’s pure Hollywood corn, but it works, mostly because Russell looks like he could bury a stick in someone’s face.
The last half hour of the movie is all Sturm und Drang, yet the only powerful moments are quiet and solitary: when Brooks has to tell a player he’s been cut from the team immediately before the games, just as he was cut 20 years earlier, or when he disappears into a deserted hallway after the victory over the Soviets and slides to the floor overwhelmed, alone with his vindication. Even the movie’s inspirational sound bite ends on a sad personal note, when Brooks arrives home and finds that the family he’s neglected for nine months have gone to bed without him. It’s even more poignant given that the 66-year-old coach died last year in a car accident on his way home.
