by Kevin Bresnahan, Contributor

I suppose Miracle (2004) is a historical movie, appearing as it did twenty-four years after the events depicted, and even more so because the film itself is at pains to locate its story in a particular moment in America. Beginning with the title sequence, a montage of the 1960s and 70s TV news shots of anti-war and women’s liberation protests, Nixon lying, Love Canal, the Oil Embargo and finally Jimmy Carter’s famous “malaise” speech, the message is delivered, we get it: America was on the ropes in 1980, and knew it.

In the midst of this national rot came the 1980 Olympic Men’s Hockey team, a bunch of underdog kids who managed to catch lightning in a bottle and, on their way to the medal podium, electrified and invigorated a sullen American people, got Reagan elected, and won the Cold War. 

The last parts are a very slight exaggeration. 

It’s been forty-one years now, since that winter, and to say that America has been on a bit of roller coaster ride in the interim is not an overstatement. But the movie, at least, holds up.

Gavin O’Connor makes an interesting choice in casting, reversing the controversial decision by NASA in Armageddon, to teach oil drillers to be astronauts rather than to teach astronauts to run an oil rig. O’Connor decides that rather than teach actors how to play hockey, he will cast hockey players and train them to act. It makes the picture, and the occasional dead line of dialog is a small price to pay for the exciting and realistic hockey action, but more importantly, for the pure guileless faces of the young players.

Many of the young men assembling to try out for that team come from two places: Eastern New England and Minnesota. There is plenty of bad blood between the factions, left over from the storied 1976 NCAA Tournament semi-final game between Boston University and Minnesota, a game full of hard hits and one massive brawl which ended up with BU’s leading scorer disqualified. The Boston boys are still smarting about this when they arrive to join the team with the same Golden Gophers who had denied them their Frozen Four dream four years before. 

The players cling fervently to their college loyalties, and there are chips on a lot of shoulders. This team should not work. 

The task is to create a unit out of these rivalrous kids, to make a US team. Can America, torn asunder then, as it is right now, between left and right, city and country, liberal and conservative–the Vietnam War ended five years before this team took to the ice–set aside our differences and unite the way we did in the Old Days. Can Boston and Minnesota come together, and remember what it is to be American?

Kurt Russell plays the legendary coach Herb Brooks, the man tasked with this job, already with three NCAA National Championships under his belt at the University of Minnesota. Russell has never been a flashy performer, but in this case his stone-faced demeanor perfectly suits the taciturn Midwesterner. Brooks wears sweet plaid trousers, and his mop of hair could deflect a slap shot. But Russell does find one or two stirrings of emotion within. 

Patricia Clarkson, always good, breathes life into a tired cliché, as the loving wife who nags the hero back from his quest. We obligingly go through these scenes where she chides Brooks for his single-mindedness.  But Patti Brooks, in the end, toes the line, as Hollywood’s Patti Brookses tend to do.

It doesn’t matter. This picture lives or dies with the players, with Herb Brooks’s “boys.”

Particularly good is Michael Mantenuto as the stalwart defensemen Jack O’Callahan, a team leader whom the non-actor renders with such a rough-edged mix of honest Boston charm and violence that I had high school flashbacks. Mantenuto was so fresh out of NCAA hockey when he answered the casting call that he started a fight during auditions, and was certain he’d ruined his chances for the part. In fact, they signed him immediately. This is just what they were looking for. 

As future NHL goalie Jim Craig, Eddie Cahill–the only legit actor in the bunch–is worth watching as he works through this brilliant, troubled player, and man. Goalies in hockey are like pitchers in baseball, the crucial position and the one solo performer in a team game. Both roles attract iconoclasts, and sometimes even thinkers. 

Brooks runs the boys through their paces, and we get well-executed scenes of hockey training. They put Dan Stoloff’s camera right out there on the ice, skating with the team. Brooks runs the boys hard, pausing only to ask, of various players, their name, where they are from, and who they play for?

Boston University is one answer. 

University of Minnesota. 

UNH. 

The players still retain their individual loyalties and I think it’s fair to say that the film intends this criticism for the country at large, to an American people wrapped up in their own struggles and no longer devoted to the ideal of the United States. All pluribus, no unum. At one point Brooks listens to President Carter’s famous “malaise” speech, delivered on Independence Day, 1979:

It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.

Meanwhile, CCCP emblazoned on their red sweaters, the Soviet team continues to train their steely-eyed, mirthless automatons. A few years after the events of this picture, James Cameron, in The Terminator, will give us the language to describe the Cold War Soviets in our minds, as mindless, irresistible robots: “You still don’t get it… That’s what he does. That’s all he does! You can’t stop him!” 

This is what we told ourselves during the Cold War. The Soviets were stronger than us because, having no access to American freedom, they had no choice but to focus on one thing: winning. They were a nation of Ivan Dragos. Our freedom was our weakness, and we would be stronger if only we could do away with all the distractions of democracy, as our foes had done. 

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The second act is superb, following the team’s intense training in Minnesota. Noah Emmerich is very good here as assistant coach Ryan Patrick, and you can see in his performance the reticent humanity which will eventually inform his star turn in The Americans. But the driving force is Russell’s Brooks. He is relentless, too, just like the Soviets. He’s without emotion. He understands that to beat the Russians Team USA will need to learn to play their game. 

He drives this point home in brutal training, again and again, until the players can’t take any more. 

After a sloppy, lackadaisical performance in a “friendly” against the Norwegians, Brooks hounds the boys back onto the ice for some “bag” skating, a conditioning exercise which, coming after a game, can only be punitive, even malicious. He forces them to skate sprints again and again. And again. And again. It is cruel and senseless. It’s abuse. 

The boys are ready to break. The team doctor tries to intervene, but Brooks is single-minded.

Again. 

And then, a leader emerges. 

“I’m Mike Eruzione, from Winthrop, Mass.”

“Who do you play for?”

“The United States of America.”

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Two summers ago, before the plague hit, my wife and I drove up to Lake Placid, New York, for a wedding. I found it hard to imagine the sleepy little town as the center of the world, but that’s what it was for two weeks in 1980. 

During our visit we went to the surprisingly modest rink where 1980 Olympic ice hockey tournament was played–spoiler alert: it’s now called the Herb Brooks Arena–and we sat in the stands as a Zamboni made its methodical pattern around the ice. 

You got ten seconds. The countdown going on right now. Morrow, up to Schultz, five seconds left in the game. Do you believe in miracles? Yes!

Those of us who grew up loving the Winter Olympics had to make do without too many American heroes. Every once in a while you got a Bonnie Blair or a Billy Kidd, but by and large the Winter Games were dominated by Northern and Eastern Europeans. My particular favorite was a wild man Austrian skier called Franz Klammer who took the gold in the Men’s Downhill at Innsbruck in 1976. 

That was one of the nice things about the winter games. The “Up Close & Personal” segments weren’t all about Americans, and you really had to dig the international vibe. Jim McKay was there, cool and kind, the man who had got us through the Munich Massacre. It was highly unlike today when NBC’s jingoistic Bob Costas-centric coverage might as well be pumped out of Fox News. 

But over this hung the ghost of the 1972 Olympic basketball tournament in Munich, in which Team USA was badly jobbed by corrupt and hostile referees who gave the USSR not one nor two but three extra shots at the game winner in the Gold Medal game.

The only reason nobody remembers this is because the Munich Olympic Games of 1972 evoke an outrage far beyond sports, when eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team were murdered by terrorists. There may or may not have been times when the Olympics were kept separate from politics, but if so, 1980 was not one of them.  

I won’t belabor what happens in the tournament. You either know it already or don’t care. I will say that O’Connor and editor John Gilroy hit their stride here, cutting between really well done hockey shots, and amusing asides about the growing media fervor around the team. The production spent hours choreographing the games, and it shows. The hockey scenes are exciting, and incredibly alive. 

In the end, the film comes down to the climactic confrontation with the Soviets in the semis. 

One game, says Brooks. If we played them ten times, they might win nine. But not this game, not tonight. Tonight, we skate with them. 

Game on.

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Film is a way for the ordinary person to transcend the ordinary, to step outside the grind of daily life and, for a moment, to experience a heightened, concentrated reality. Sports are about the same thing. Each creates an artificial universe where the stakes are higher, where it’s life or death, win or lose, gold or dross. 

A really good sports film, like Miracle, taps into that heightened state of being where every moment is gorged with meaning. In a hundred thirty-six minutes it will be over, but for now, the answer is: Yes, we do believe in miracles.