Watch The ‘Miracle’ Movie On The 40th Anniversary Of The ‘Miracle On Ice’

In the early Aughts, not long after a Republican administration fabricated a rationale to drag us into a war in the Middle East —a move motivated by greed, stoked by fear-mongering, and carried off with the complicity of a cowed and deceived legislative branch— director Gavin O’Connor made Miracle. This 2004 film, currently streaming on Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime, is about the 1980 American Olympic Hockey Team, a group of plucky amateurs set up for a big fall at the hands of a Russian team comprised of salty veterans that had not been defeated for years in international competition. The American’s unlikely victory became known as the “Miracle on Ice” and, for a brief moment, brought the United States together.

It opens with an exceptional three-minute credit sequence setting the film in the midst of the unrest from the end of the ’60s through the ’70s. The collapse of a housing bubble, the women’s liberation movement, and Watergate share time with images from the Soviet’s 1972 May Day parade designed to show off our Cold War adversary’s military might. Sharing a screen with Gerald Ford taking the oath of office after Nixon’s resignation run images of a American dollars running off giant industrial presses. Saigon falls and our popular culture becomes increasingly vacuous and distracting. Democrat Jimmy Carter is elected in 1976 and during his uncelebrated term Love Canal, Three Mile Island, the Energy Crisis and the Iran Hostage situation unfold. Even Elvis dies. As O’Connor’s director’s credit comes on, and then the title of the film, we see an extended clip of Carter’s infamous July 15, 1979 “Crisis of Confidence” speech that many saw as the essential end of his Presidency. Carter told the truth about the emotionally depressed state of the nation and we didn’t want that. We wanted to feel better about ourselves and Reagan rode to a landslide on a promise to make America “great again.”

Its table thus set, Miracle settles into the familiar rhythms of a David vs. Goliath underdog sports drama in which hard-nosed coach Herb Brooks (Kurt Russell) is recruited to turn a team that had recently lost to “the Czech B-team” into a group that won’t embarrass themselves in the upcoming Olympics. There are scenes where the largely-interchangeable players show up as a ragtag group of individuals to be forged through training montages into a scrappy group of ideological zealots. About forty-five minutes in, after a bad loss during the lead up to the big show, Brooks tortures his team with a brutal post-game drill that only ends when one of his players, Mike Eruzione (Patrick O’Brien Dempsey), grasps Brooks’ lesson and declares his allegiance in no uncertain terms to “the United States of America.” A rousing moment in a film engineered to arouse, it has about it a disturbing air of jingoistic nationalism cloaked in nostalgia. It gives you a tingle, but as we’ve seen in the sixteen years since, there’s a cost attached to the kind of camaraderie-through-fear this film celebrates.

But it works. Miracle is a machine-tooled marvel of a propaganda film appearing at a time in this country when it had a choice to make about the leaders it wanted. Would it be John Kerry, a war veteran with a moderate platform? Or would it be the guy who hid in the National Guard and cast aspersions on the other man’s service in a way so egregious that the tactic of that particular variety of political slander, “swift-boating,” became its own term? The usefulness of another look at Miracle is the conversation it inspires. There’s a line in Martin Ritt’s Hud where an old rancher played by the great Melvyn Douglas laments that “little by little the look of the country changes because of the men we admire” and Miracle is about a pyrrhic victory, a noisy distraction, in the middle of one of the most crucial transitions in our nation’s history. Miracle is a film about a crucial political flashpoint that was released during another crucial political flashpoint. Looking at it in 2020, one finds us at the same crossroads with another election looming before us. I enjoy Miracle. I like to feel good and, stripped of its politics, it’s Hoosiers on ice. Looking back, though, the only thing I find nostalgic about the time it depicts is that we used to know the Russians were our enemies.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2020. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Where to stream Miracle