You may ask
yourself what inspired me to revisit a not entirely memorable, though worth
seeing at the time, sports movie about a great sports moment from 31 years ago.
It was actually seeing Warrior several weeks ago. Both films are directed by Gavin O’Connor and I was curious
to see how his nearly excellent sports film from this year compares to one from
7 years ago.
It is perhaps the greatest moment in the history of
sports. It at least makes the top five. The United States Olympic Men’s Hockey
team did the unfathomable by defeating the Soviet Union in the 1980 Lake Placid
Olympics. There is hardly a more galvanizing moment in American sports history
than that one, as 20 college-age amateur hockey players took to the ice and
brought down the behemoths, those mythical beasts of the USSR who were regarded
as the best hockey team in the world by far and had won the gold in the
previous four Olympic games. What most people forget or treat as an
afterthought just as Gavin O’Connor’s 2004 film Miracle does is that the US had to play and win a game against
Finland to take the gold medal. Beating the Soviets was a great moment, but it would
have fallen into the recesses of bittersweet memories of almost-made-its had
our boys not won that next game.
Quite often great sports moments are about much more than
the contest itself. Tiger Woods winning the Master’s at age 21 was made more
significant by the fact that a man with his skin color achieved the feat in a
club that didn’t allow blacks in until 1990. I recently wrote about how my
enjoyment of the 2001 MLB playoffs was augmented by the events of 9/11. Without
the memory of that tragic day seared into my consciousness, I would have paid
little attention to the Yankees that year. So it is with the so called “Miracle
on Ice,” a sporting event pitting the two great Cold War adversaries against
one another. Not only that, but world events were conspiring to bring America
to its knees for the first time in its long and storied history.
Miracle begins
with a montage of audio and still photo clips presenting a decade of American
history: Vietnam protesters; Watergate; the resignation of President Nixon; a
gas crisis. The recollection of these events during the opening credits serves
to establish the national mood at the end of the decade. Later in the film a heartfelt
speech by President Carter to allay Americans’ fears and news items including
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Iranian students storming the American
embassy in Tehran, taking hostages, are used as punctuation marks to accentuate
the events on screen. Several years ago an HBO documentary about the “Miracle
on Ice” perhaps ascribed a little more significance to these events than was
necessary in an attempt to turn a great hockey match into something more. The
film appears to take its cue partially from that documentary.
In most sports movies, it’s not about whether the team wins
or loses. It’s the journey that matters or in some cases the character arc of a
player or coach. Maybe that’s why Eric Guggenheim, who wrote the screenplay,
decided to make winning the gold a single-minded personal endeavor for coach
Herb Brooks. In real life Brooks was the last person cut from the squad before
the US Men’s team won gold in 1960. A little too much is made of that incident
as a defining moment, trying to provide a pat and unconvincing motivation to
the character.
As far as the sports contest goes, in Miracle we already know the outcome. By
all accounts, the film should contain little drama when it comes to the actual
sporting events, but surprisingly O’Connor is somehow able to milk it. His game
“footage” was recreated with painstaking attention to detail, starting with the
casting of the twenty young men who make up the team. For the most part, they
were all hockey players who not only had a natural talent for acting, but in
most cases bear a physical resemblance to the real-life players they’re
portraying. As for the recreation of the games, O’Connor went back to the
original tapes and had plays drawn up. His players learned the moves and they
shot it all as if it were the real thing. From a technical standpoint this is
remarkable not only for getting those details right, but then they had to put
camera men out there on the ice with the players. The game sequences are
expertly shot with cuts from the point of view of the TV cameras to on-ice
cameras that capture the gritty action up close and with fluidity. O’Connor
even had Al Michaels and Ken Dryden re-record their play-by-play, although he
spliced in Michaels’ original “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!!!” call that he
made in the final seconds of the game against the USSR.
Guggenheim builds the drama through the characters,
beginning with coach Brooks (Kurt Russell) and his unbending will to coach the
team his way. The players may hate him for it, but they respect him. His wife
Patti (Patricia Clarkson), however, feels left out of the decision to take a
year off from life to pursue his goal. Clarkson is a gifted actress who can
make the most out of an unnecessary subplot littered with hokum. Such is the
nature of working for Disney studios. Unfortunately, Guggenheim litters his
story with the occasional embarrassingly cheesy moments as when Brooks works
the team to a pulp after they exhibit lack of concentration in an exhibition
game and their exhaustion culminates in the team captain finally exclaiming
(for the first time) that he plays for “The United States of America!” And if
you think that one is bad, there’s a worse one around the corner after Brooks
brings in a wringer late in the training and only a couple weeks before the
Games only to face down the team leaders who tell him it’s wrong because they’re
“a family.” Ugh, can’t this studio release anything without that kind of thick
syrup running all over it?
Still, the sappy moments don’t completely detract from an
otherwise well-crafted sports movie. Yes, this is ultimately the kind of movie
where supporting players like Noah Emmerich as assistant coach Craig Patrick and
Kenneth Walsh as the team doctor are nondescript without a whole lot being
asked of them in terms of performance (Clarkson is the exception, who elevates
every movie she’s in). In spite of its lukewarm presentation, it fills the job
of inspirational cinema without asking for too much commitment from its
viewers.
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