Ray Pride

A compact epic about an inarticulate dreamer, Gavin O'Connor's "Miracle" is a sweet surprise: a Disney sports movie that doesn't explain itself every step of the way.

For the 1980 Winter Olympic Games, the United States Ice Hockey team was a haphazard bunch of college kids, pulled together by gruff, obstinate coach Herb Brooks (Kurt Russell). Who would they eventually face? The Soviet Union's professional team, many of whom had played together for over a decade.

Gavin O'Connor's only other movie is the 1999 Sundance mother-daughter entry "Tumbleweeds" which boasts a splendid performance by Janet McTeer and Kimberly Brown as her contentious daughter. (The producers minted 2002's Dennis Quaid hit, "The Rookie.") O'Connor demonstrates a feathery touch in a sledgehammer genre, but he remains very much a director of actors.

The lack of fashion of almost twenty-five years ago is quickly sketched in: cheap tweed jackets, tacky v-neck sweaters, and yes, plaid trousers. From first glimpse, Russell's Brooks looks like a man out of time, or of no time. (O'Connor has written that "Herb Brooks was a hockey egghead, a mad scientist and the team was his lab experiment.") As Brooks takes the few months he has to mold his fresh charges, he glares, masticates under a bowl cut, looking initially like a pudgy and defeated Bill Pullman. Patricia Clarkson, an actress who cannot be inauthentic, plays Brooks' worried wife. Together, Clarkson and Russell are the kind of performers who don't need speeches, only glances and silences. Russell's slight Minnesota accent goes in and out, but it hardly matters. (Noah Emmerich offers a capable assist as Brooks' right hand man, with his idiosyncratic line readings and endlessly upbeat expressions.)

The hockey team's another matter. It's strange at first, having trouble differentiating all these ropy black-haired bundles of twentysomething testosterone, until you realize that's part of the movie's game: they're a team. They're one unit, molded by Brooks. In most movies, casting directors go for a variety of types, but almost to a player, the twenty members of the hockey team resemble one another: pretty cheekbones, blue eyes, floppy dark bangs falling into their faces. Daniel Stoloff's shooting and John Gilroy's editing aptitude work with that limitation. O'Connor understands the gifts and strengths of his middle-aged players. The faces we learn are those of Russell, Emmerich and Clarkson, the experienced ones instead of the callow ones. There's the occasional ill-focused or ill-composed re-framing of a shot, and it never seems unplanned, merely effortlessly dynamic. There's genre aptitude to burn here. (Mark Isham's score is filled with Sturming and Dranging, more Steve Reich at a few moments on the ice than his own customary trumpet-led style.)

The filmmakers shot 133 plays, they claim, and there's a jittery vitality if not a noticeable variety to the untrained eye. O'Connor favors in-close shots, handheld at the right moments, cut with a razory accuracy. While a big proponent of compositions that place large objects in the foreground before booming upward to reveal the point of the shot, it becomes vocabulary rather than mannerism over the machined 135 minutes of the movie.

"Ach, so much hate and fear," an older coach reflects on the US and Soviet saber rattling at that point in the cold war, and there is a somber and sober underpinning to the story, a simmering melancholy at the end of Jimmy Carter's term, and especially after the taking of hostages in Tehran.

There are small period details that jar nicely: NBC's late anchorwoman Jessica Savitch announces the Iranian hostage footage. A wall of telegrams--strangely with a fake logo instead of Western Union's--congratulate the team on its first successes. But the most telling is a montage during which Brooks is driving home and listening to the radio, a speech of several minutes by Carter. The President's words are common as the idealism bled into the southern dirt. It's where a pop-song montage might go in another film. Carter's words are infused with the same idealism as Brooks will carry to the Games. It's kind of beautiful, the language a rebuke to blind allegiance without "common faith" and idealism.

Similarly, when the team arrives to play at New York's Madison Square Garden in an exhibition game, a helicopter shot establishes Manhattan, and dead center, the World Trade Center and the strains of the pre-game swells of the Star Spangled Banner. Someone in the audience unfurls a banner: "Soviets Get The Puck Out of Afghanistan." Still, the movie never turns to jingoism. It's uplift without schmaltz, and hope without apology. Grimy-looking, dashed together, packed with facts, "Miracle" is still a pretty picture.

"Miracle" opens Friday.

(2004-02-03)

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