To my surprise, this movie was made in 2004, and I really though it was made sooner than that because it feels like it's always been around, like it had always been a classic. Surprisingly, not a lot of people regard it as such and it doesn't get the credit it deserves. There are a lot of great sports movies, but this is perhaps my favorite. A little while back I gave strong acclaim to Rocky, which turned out to not really be a sports film, even though it had a sport in it. Before I saw it, I thought it had won Best Picture because it was something like Miracle.

I can understand why this isn't iconic There's something familiar about it all, since it uses a theme that one critic called "a sure thing." That is to say, it's an inspirational sports movie about a touching historic event, and it was produced by Disney. It also starred Kurt Russell, who had a long history with Disney, so everything about this was squeaky clean.

You can go into this movie expecting either something groundbreaking or "been there, done that." I would set either of these expectations aside and desire a movie that simply takes the norms for an inspirational sports movie and delivers them as purely as possible. Yes, the athletes walk in needing character development. Yes, they work so hard that they honestly can't believe they're still standing. Yes, there's a great big payoff at the end. All these things happen and they must happen, but what I appreciate is that the director knew that the story was bigger than the style he brought to it. I have for a few years now adhered to a quote by Thomas Carlyle that goes "The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity." With this, the film excels and doesn't have any inhibitions about being sincere, even if it means not being the most artsy of all movies. It takes on a certain vulnerability by being humble. It isn't trying to be great because it's merely reflecting the greatness of history it has great respect for. In spite of being a "sure thing," it wasn't a manufactured film; rather, it was very well-intentioned and proved itself as such.

Skipping to the chase, this movie is about Herb Brooks (Kurt Russell), understood by director Gavin O'Connor to be a mad scientist with a far-fetched idea no one else is willing to try or even fully conceive. He has a certain plan for the team, but he's the only person who understands it. Basically, he plays the coaching equivalent of "good cop, bad cop" with them so that they can unite against him and start working as a team. He always maintains a professional distance from them, but he dedicates himself so much to training this team that he also alienates himself from his wife. As such, Herb doesn't have both feet in either worlds. Still, those moments behind closed doors with his wife, Patty, offer an excellent moment of vulnerability to the man behind the team and help us to get behind him, to understand him, and to be able to go with him through the movie. In O'Connor's directing and Russel's acting (in what I believe to be his definitive role), I'm really sold on Herb. He was always a pleasure to watch. It was subtle, but the result was that throughout the movie Bert's character absolutely shined.

Herb, however, is not the person we are to relate with. Assistant coach Craig Patrick plays the role of the chorus, whose reactions to Bert tell the audience how to feel. It wasn't in the original script, and it didn't occur to me that this was what the director was doing until he said so right in the commentary. Once I heard it, I realized that he was absolutely right.

Then, finally, there are the hockey players themselves, one of them even being the son of the very man he depicts (Buzz Schneider was played by his son, Billy Schneider), which perhaps makes for the most interesting element to this film. The actors who played these figures were hockey players themselves, and had to perform up to a certain standard before being allowed to audition for a role. The director wanted these guys, of all people, to be real and authentic, and taking on people who weren't actors for the roles was a big risk. M. Night Shyamalan more recently did this in The Last Airbender and failed. Miracle, by some miracle, succeeds with an entire cast of non-actors. The reactions that these people had to Kurt Russel playing Herb were often genuine and unscripted, captured on-camera when the director kept things rolling in case he found a jewel. Kurt would reinforce this authentic chemistry by keeping his distant from the hockey players. They would genuinely drill the actors, and when two of the players got into a fight in the movie the actors were genuinely involved in fighting. The bruises and sores on their body were real and not products of the makeup department.

Nowhere did this authenticity come into play in the film's most powerful and pivotal scene, where the team finally "gets it" and understands what Herb is going after. They tie to Norway and Herb begins to drill them. Again. And again. And again. How long this went on, I'm not entirely sure. The director did an excellent job of distorting time, which was probably a good call. The scene went on for a long time, with Herb coaching the team with some very strong words, such as "you think you can win on talent alone? Gentlemen, you don't have enough talent to win on talent alone!" and "This cannot be a team of common men, because common men go nowhere. You have to be uncommon. Again." There's about seven minutes to this scene, of the repeated drilling. Technically, that could have all been done in just one brief moment, but O'Connor knew that this was the one pivotal moment in the film where everything needed to be slowed down. This repetition needed to reinforce the audience as well as the characters, and they ended up reinforcing the actors themselves. When I said that this scene was authentic, they genuinely drilled the hockey players until they dropped. That exhaustion is completely real. The players kept on drilling in front of the camera until they got sick.

So say what you may about this being a film that's been done before, about normal people overcoming extraordinary challenges, but you don't come across something as sincerely communicated as that too often.

To capture everything he possibly could, O'Connor kept many cameras rolling at once. He talked about how there was always something going on in every shot, whether it was something physical or something emotional, but he was always progressing the story. With so much to show and so many priceless shots, I actually noticed that this was perhaps the most impressively edited film I have ever scene. I tend to be a person who puts a lot more emphasis on cinematography than editing, preferring to make takes that are long and unedited, but if a film is going to have a lot of editing, it might as well feel like this, since everything falls together so seamlessly. It really shows in the Oslo drilling scene, but also in the opening of the movie, which is a montage of the 70's which did an amazing job of building up the context and the atmosphere of the film. All I can say was that it was truly beautiful. Elegantly put together was also a scene in Minnesota where the team played football in the snow while Herb drove home to a family who had already gone to bed, all to the voice-over of President Carter speaking over the radio. It was another highlight of the film that I always strongly remembered, especially since the football game looks so amazingly real to me as a person who, as he types this, is looking out the window to a Minnesota landscape painted white with winter's glory. Something about that scene really hits home with me; perhaps that something is everything.

After all the drill montages and the jumping between the two worlds Herb Brooks lived between, the film climaxes exactly how you'd expect it to. There are few historic liberties taken in the telling of this tale. Some of the moments behind closed doors and the climax of the Oslo scene were liberties taken by the director and writers, but they they did a great job of contributing toward truth that was already there and was all generally used to show us the psyche of these real people in ways that we could understand only later during interviews. I really appreciate what Disney, Gavin O'Connor, Kurt Russell, and the hockey players in the cast did with this film, and it will always hold a close place in my heart.

I believe in miracles. God bless America.