Some of you have been around Desipio for the better part of six years now.

My God, has it really been that long? Back in the day, we used to review movies every week.

Nowadays it takes something major to get us to put fingers to qwerty and do a review. On Friday night, I got all of the motivation I needed to write this one.

Disney’s made a lot of crap lately, but “Miracle” doesn’t belong on that pile.

No, sir.

I’m not a hockey fan, as you can tell by the fact that we never mention it in this space. I was seven when the 1980 US Olympic hockey team shocked the world and won the gold medal. But we all know the story.

The movie does a great job at the beginning of using news footage to remind us of just what kind of place the US was in the late 1970s. If you think the economy is screwed now, it is nothing compared to what we were going through then. Oil embargoes made gas scarce, unemployment was at an all-time high, we were still reminded of the Russians screwing us out of the gold medal in basketball at the 1972 Olympics in Munich…

The thing that struck me was that it’s hard for the United States to be an underdog at anything. That’s what made the 1980 hockey team so unique. The Soviets were not allowing their best players to play professional hockey, so they, in essence, had a high quality professional team of their own. The best American players were in the NHL. Even that might not have made that big of a difference considering the Russians routinely beat All-Star NHL teams in exhibitions.

There are times when everything falls into place, and it did in 1980. The Olympics were being played here, in Lake Placid. We were still four Olympics removed from professional players being allowed to participate. Jimmy Carter was trying to screw up the Olympics forever by refusing to go to Moscow that summer, but the Russians told him to go screw himself and came to Lake Placid anyway. But most of all, the Americans had picked the right coach.

“Miracle” is about Herb Brooks far more that it’s about Jim Craig, or Mike Eruzione or Jack O’Callahan. It’s what makes it work. You can’t make a movie about a star-less, underdog, gritty hockey team and pick one or two or three of them to focus on (thereby making them stars). There was only one star on that team, and it was Herb.

Turning history into a movie is hard enough, but when you’re taking such well known, well documented history as this and turning it into a movie, the job becomes even more thankless. Yet “Miracle” manages to make goosebump moments out of things you already know the resolution to.

Even non-hockey fans know that Mike Eruzione was the captain of that team and scored the winning goal against the USSR, but you find yourself buying into the notion that Brooks might cut him anyway.

Kurt Russell does an unbelievable job as Brooks. He was so into nailing the role that not only did he spend time with Brooks, but he learned to write lefthanded to be just that much more authentic. His Minnesota accent is spot on (though for pure comedy he could have used the William H. Macy accent from Fargo–but then, that’s probably a North Dakota accent–never mind) and to prove he’s not just another pretty face, Russell gets the bad haircut and wears the plaid pants.

Brooks is not an easy man to play. To make the movie work you have to show what a prick he was to his players, but still make him likeable. Russell absolutely seals the deal in three scenes.

– The “Herbies” scene after a lackluster tie against the Norwegian National Team on their European exhibition tour. I went to bed with “Blow the whistle, Craig” ringing in my ears.
– The scene with Rob McClanahan in the dressing room between periods after McClanahan has suffered a deep thigh bruise in which Herb screams at McClanahan to put his gear on. McClanahan has been told by the doctor that he’s out, but after a review of his x-ray (or ‘picture’ as Herb called it) the doctor tells Herb that McClanahan can go after all. Herb decides to prove a point so instead of telling Rob that his leg’s OK he challenges him in front of the team. It ends with McClanahan yelling, “What do you want from me!” Herb says, “I want you to be a hockey player!” Rob chases him through the dressing room yelling, “I AM a hockey player!” Herb heads for the door, turns to assistant Coach Craig Patrick and says, “Think that’ll shake them up?”
– The scene in which Brooks, the final man cut from the 1960 gold medal hockey team, has to cut the final player from this team. It could have been corny…but it wasn’t. Just a great scene.

The hockey in the movie is unreal. The reason it’s so good is that the producers made the decision to find hockey players and teach them to act instead of the other way around. With the notable exception of Eddie Cahill (Tag from “Friends”), the rest of the cast were unknowns. Eddie plays Jim Craig, and convieniently–since goalies wear masks–they could use former NHL’er Bill Ranford to do the acrobatic goalie stuff.

The thing that made the movie for me was the amount of time and detail they put into the big clash with the Soviets. They devoted 40 minutes to the game. Incredible. After all, other than Brooks, the game is the star of the movie. They do it up right.

Two things stand out, one, the great line when the Russians put in their backup goalie to start the second period. Brooks leans over the board to his team and points at the Russian bench and says, “He just put the best goalie in the world on the bench.” In the frantic final moments of the game, the Americans are waiting for the Russians to pull their goalie, but it doesn’t happen. Patrick, the assistant coach, wonders out loud when “he” (the Russian coach) is going to do it, and Brooks smiles and realizes, “He doesn’t know what to do!” The Russians had won 42 consecutive games, they didn’t know how to react when they were behind.

But when you see the movie, the thing you’ll take away from it is the way they filmed the final two minutes of the game. They do it in real time and they cut frantically from one thing to the next, creating the kind of tension that should be impossible to generate from a game that we know the ending to, but it works.

We know that the Americans still had to beat Finland the next night to win the gold medal, and that posed a problem for the filmmakers. They had Russell do a voice over, in character, as Brooks to wrap it up. That wasn’t the gold medal game like we have now. In 1980, the Olympic hockey tournament was still purely round robin and the team with the most points won the tournament. The US had a tie (against Sweden) and could not afford a loss to Finland and still win the gold medal. Behind 2-1 after two periods, Brooks (as has been noted by our intrepid readers before) gave his immortal, “If you lose this game, you’ll take it to your graves! Your f@#$ing graves!” speech. Disney left that out. I wonder why?

But the voice over and highlight montage is very well done. You even get the moment when Mike Eruzione broke with tradition and got the entire team (not just the captain as was customary) to stand on the gold medal platform.

And stick around for the credits, they also have a nice touch, they show you each character, give you his name, the actor’s name and what the player is now doing for a living. You’ll be amazed how many of them are investment bankers.

So if you haven’t seen “Miracle” yet, you really need to. You won’t see a better movie all year.

And if you scoff when you see the ads running that call the win over the Soviets the “greatest sports moment of all time”, well, it’s true.

At least until this October.