There is a
moment in Miracle that completely
catches you off guard.
After months
of training under their militaristic coach Herb Brooks (Kurt Russell), the 1980
USA Olympic hockey team is finally coming together. This motley band of individual college hotshots has been whipped
into cohesion and is playing like a team.
Until Brooks introduces another player in the 11th hour,
right before the opening ceremonies.
Where did he come from? The other players wonder. Why have we been breaking our backs for six
months when this greenhorn can have a shot at Lake Placid?
Mike Eruzione
(Patrick O’Brien Demsey), Jack O’Callahan (Michael Mantenuto), Rob
McClanahan (Nathan West) and Mark Johnson (Eric Peter-Kaiser) confront their
coach on a bus trip about this immediate problem.
Brooks tells
them that this other kid is just as good as they are, that he can do a lot for
their team, that he is just like you.
Tell me why should I use just you guys and not the new kid.
“Because we’re
a family!” Johnson exclaims.
The moment
hushes the other three players and halts Russell. It doesn’t even sound like it was scripted because the stunned expression
on Russell’s face tells otherwise.
Brooks the coach tells the players that while this new player is great,
he is going to be sent home. The team
that has sweated for six months through killer practices is the team to take on
the Soviet Union.
Forget taking
on the world. In 1980 the Soviet Union was the world, and the only team worth
playing. After 20 years of domination,
it was the USA hockey team that dethroned the Evil Empire, which bore more than
a passing resemblance to the nation it played for.
Miracle is remarkable for how it exceeds
expectations just like the Olympic team did.
Kurt Russell is at his finest as the low-key but feverishly intense
coach Brooks, who died last year in an auto accident. Russell purses his lip, scrunches his shoulders and lowers his
eyes to capture the brains behind the glory.
He has always been a competent, occasionally rewarding actor, but in Miracle Russell takes his place
alongside Burgess Meredith in Rocky
and Gene Hackman in Hoosiers as one
of the cinema’s great coaches.
The other
surprise of Miracle is the quality of
the hockey players themselves. Most
were college players recruited specifically for the film. It is a testament to director Gavin O’Connor
that they never appeared to be amateur actors and for once the cliché of “It
really seemed like you were watching a team” was true. Thankfully Keanu Reeves was not in
goal.
Of the
amateurs, Mantenuto as Jack O’Callahan is the standout. At once pretty boy but tough as a ram, you
know Mantenuto is real once you hear that Boston accent. Actors pretending to
be hockey players don’t have an accent that authentic. If a professional actor is from Boston, they
lose the accent and then try to gain it back again for a film role. “O’C” works through this role just like an
athlete conditions for the big game, and practically steals the show from
Russell.
Miracle is more than a sports movie. It shrewdly places itself in the context of
what was happening in America at the time.
It’s difficult to remember, even in these post 9/11 days, how dark this
country was 24 years ago. How most
Americans, after a disastrous decade, believed the 80s would be even worse than
what they had just experienced. In Miracle, without ever saying it, you can
feel outside the hermetically sealed hockey chamber that real-world daily
tragedies are going on. Gas prices, the
Hostages in Iran, all these things Brooks ignores until it threatens the
Soviets coming to the Olympic games.
Then Brooks starts to care. And
we realize that this is going to be more than a hockey victory for the United
States.
And what of
the hockey action itself? That’s more
problematic. This being 2004, a simple
hockey game doesn’t seem to do for an audience raised on frenetic editing. O’Connor doesn’t trust the built-in
excitement of a live hockey game and instead pulls the camera in too tight,
often making it confusing as to what is happening at a particular moment. Simpler, wider shots would have been far
more persuasive. It’s a minor misstep
but the camera work does threaten to undercut the natural intensity of perhaps
the greatest sports moment in American history.
Of course,
another “miracle” in Olympic hockey is impossible nowadays. Realizing they liked winning the Gold and
not wanting to take any chances, the U.S. Olympic Committee started recruiting
NHL professionals for the “amateur” squad soon after Lake Placid. But for this shining moment, a bunch of
21-year-old kids from Minnesota and Boston conquered the world, driven by a
coach who understood them better then they understood themselves.
In the
immortal words of play-by-play announcer Al Michaels…
“Do you
believe in miracles? Yes!”
Copyright 2004 Arthur Swift. Originally published February 18, 2004.