Engaging sports docu-drama

Rating: 7/10 (16 July 2006)

When you think about all the Hollywood actors who never won an Oscar (Cary Grant, for one, although he did get one of those non-specific, gratuitous Academy Awards), Kurt Russell is in very good company. But that probably doesn't relieve the sting of having been overlooked for a Best Actor nomination for his performance in Miracle. A versatile and talented actor who has taken on a wide variety of roles, here Russell delivers a tour de force despite a bad hair piece. It is all the more difficult to portray a non-fictional character and Russell seems to have disappeared into the skin of Herb Brooks. As a coach who assembles a capable but essentially complacent hockey team and then motivates them to win Olympic gold against all odds, Russell excels playing the tough, detached drill instructor/boss whose big heart and emotional connections are carefully kept hidden. It's a tightrope walk to convey these disparate traits and Russell succeeds with subtle body language and control. He embodies the persona of a great coach without hamming it up and should have been recognized at Oscar time.
This is not the typical fodder for a sports movie where you see a small town high school team or a group of rag-tag athletes come together for one shining moment, or where one underdog scrapes and bleeds along a path to a major win. Miracle is about much more heady transformations because they are the type of attitude adjustments that last longer than one shining moment. The hockey players of that 1980 team were already tapped for pro careers, their talent already recognized, which made them a much more difficult group to teach and motivate. Most of them thought they already knew how to play & win. The coach realized that he had a bunch of guys content with the glory of merely being on the Olympic team, a glamor item for their resumes that made them more marketable. So the story is really about mentoring greatness spurred by one man's desire to finish a job he started twenty years prior. The process of pushing a large group of already successful athletes to a level of excellence and commitment they didn't know existed is quite marvelous to watch and there are many lessons to be learned from it. My favorite moment in the movie is the shot of Russell, alone in a corridor of the stadium, savoring his team's win, exulting in the validation of his worth and his love for the game, while the players are elsewhere being applauded and photographed. Achievement is always a shared joy with a ripple effect and we see it clearly in this movie and in many ways. This theme is set against a backdrop of the political crises of that decade and the contrast is thought-provoking. How much better could the world be if, instead of presidents and prime ministers, countries were led by people like Coach Brooks? How do you get people to work hard when they don't have to? How do you match up different abilities to build a model of collaborative effort?
I would have given this film an even higher rating but thought the directing was sluggish at times and the game sequences were choppy and lacked drama. I also think the writer should have pumped up the dialogue between the players as the feeling of fraternity and horsing around that you would assume occurred is missing. Some subplots could have been shortened in favor of this slant on the group dynamic. But all in all, this is a super movie with great messages that the whole family can enjoy.