I may have been only 9 at the time of the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York, but I was conscious enough to remember that a certain USA victory over the Soviet ice hockey team was a huge deal. “Do you believe in miracles?!” trumpeted sportscaster Al Michaels when the buzzer announced an astonishing semi-final victory by the scrappy young American team over the world-dominating Soviets. But to tell you the truth, at the time I must admit that I was more enraptured with figure skating than hockey.
Disney’s Miracle traces the forming of this famous 1980 USA hockey team, from the somewhat hesitant selection of Herb Brooks (Kurt Russell with an impressive helmet hairdo) as coach, to the forming of the team, to the trip to the Olympics. Herb is a hard-ass, but well-respected for his university-level coaching. He has unfinished business eating at his soul: he himself was cut from the Olympic team in 1960, and feels he has something to prove against the Soviets, who have a string of unchallenged gold medals. The young players he assembles also have their own grudges: most of them are culled from the University of Minnesota and Boston University, who have quite a nasty rivalry on the ice.
The question of course is not “Will they pull together and achieve an impossible dream?” Of course they will—we know that from the start. But in order to keep our interest, the cinematic journey has to be compelling as well. This is where Miracle falls short.
There is much emphasis on setting up the national mood at the time. The film opens with a montage of major national and international events that shaped the mood of the period, from Watergate to Vietnam to the hostages in Iran. This was interesting and all, but seemed to provide as much mood to the story as a pop song thrown onto the soundtrack to explain what the characters are feeling. And since we don’t really get to know any of the boys individually (it is emphasized over and over that they are a “team” and a “family”, and thusly should be treated as one big mass of manhood I suppose), we don’t really know what is going on in their heads.
Kurt Russell’s Herb doesn’t fare much better. He has a wife (the underused Patricia Clarkson) at home, and almost invisible children, but we barely know anything about him either. He broods a lot, watching black-and-white projected films on his wall of hockey games, trying to pick apart the Soviets’ secret formula. He speaks in a heavy Minnesota accent. He wears plaid pants. And did I mention his hair? But, you know, so what?
Maybe those excessive sports profiles you see during the modern Olympics these days (“This corn-fed hockey player almost lost his legs in a tractor accident as a boy! His mom died of cancer when he was 14! He was told that he’d never overcome dyslexia to even read the scoreboard!”) do make you care a bit more. People love stories of underdogs. But I just have a sneaking feeling that a documentary or a more personal focus would have been much more fun that the perfunctory and dull re-enactment that is Miracle.
