Starring: Kurt Russell (I), Patricia Clarkson, Nathan West

Miracle succeeds where it should not and it fails where it should. It's not a very good movie, but I couldn't help but like it, because it's as concerned with the history surrounding a sporting event as the history made by the sporting event.

That sporting event, the "miracle" of the title, refers to the United States amateur hockey team beating the professional, established Russian and Eastern Bloc teams to win the Gold Medal at the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics. The film gives most of the credit for this upset victory to the coach of the team, Herb Brooks, played by Kurt Russell.

Russell is quite good as the no-nonsense Brooks. He, and Patricia Clarkson, playing his feisty spouse, sweat it out under wigs that constantly remind that, for all the nostalgia, the `70s were one weird decade. Russell's reaction when he plays a hard-ass, unlike those done by Robert Duvall or Tommy Lee Jones, rarely gives a wink. He's all-business and he's serious, and frankly, not that much fun, which is sort of how Brooks came across.

The real-life Brooks, we discover in the film, had reason to be serious. He was the last player cut from the 1960 U.S. hockey team, the last U.S. team to win the Gold Medal in the Winter Olympics. In every Olympic gathering after that the Russians dominated everything with a crushing inevitability. Brooks, and his team of 20 young men, through hard work and a undeniable element of pure chance, bested a superior team.

Miracle focuses on Ross, almost exclusively, with scant attention paid to the individuals who made up the team itself. Though this works very well as a metaphor, particularly for successful coaching or group activity, it makes for bland emotional payoff in this film. All of the players are given an "after-school special" treatment: Jim Craig, the steadfast goalie who withstood slapshot after vicious slapshot from the Russians (and the Czechs, and the Swedes) is the kid who is sad cause his mom died; Mike Eruzione, the captain of the team and the one who scored the winning goal against the Soviets, is the kid who busts up fights. Understanding who these kids were, and their reaction to the incredible circumstance they found themselves in, is missing from this film.

What isn't missing and what's very smart about Miracle, and really what helps differentiate it from standard "long-shot-with-a-dream" fare, is how surprisingly effective it recaptures the essence of the era it occurred in; here the gloomy mood besetting the American public in the late `70s and early `80s. Director Gavin O'Connor and screenwriter Eric Guggenheim cleverly evoke the time by setting the stage historically for the build up to the Lake Placid games. The opening of the film is a time-capsule montage of the times; Vietnam, Watergate, inflation, the cold war, and a host of other plagues from the decade. As Ross pushes his kids to excel he sees newspapers with headlines proclaiming that the Russians have invaded Afghanistan and hears reports that the U.S. is threatening not to participate in the upcoming Moscow Summer Games. This all culminates, perhaps as it did in a meta-sense in real life, with President Jimmy Carter's famous (in some quarters infamous) "malaise speech." Delivered on July 15th, 1979 it's used as a counterpoint and a commentary to what's going on onscreen as the players struggle to improve their play and act as a unit. In fact, it shows, in actually a very bizarre cross-cut, set in winter, and that you're sure is going to end with a car accident, the hockey team celebrating Christmas and Ross driving home to his family while Carter's speech plaintively points out the "crisis of confidence" bedeviling the nation. Confidence would come, but not in the gentle, reflective way that Carter imagined it, but in a stirring, emotional, and immediate manner, starting with Lake Placid.

Also surprisingly muted is the final emotional payoff. Sports Illustrated considered the U.S./Soviet hockey match the greatest sporting event of the 20th century but that impact is too difficult for the filmmakers to recreate. It's also increasingly frustrating not to get a standard full-rink shot of the game in progress. What we have instead is a nearly a "puck-cam" with lots of jostling in a you-are-there effort. It's not an event you are expecting to relive but you do want to appreciate it all over again, with perhaps a better context. But when Al Michaels shouts once again, "Do you believe in miracles?" at the end of the third quarter it's almost as if you wait for him to say, "Cause you just saw one" instead of knowing, as we all did when it happened, that we had.