Without more focused attention on Brooks's working processes for their own sake (e.g., we're told about a trio of players who develop an offensive specialty but we're not shown exactly what it is) and without greater efflorescence of the romance storytelling, the movie, at 133 minutes, is a little protracted. The romance elements are brought out in as squarely realistic a way as possible and thus given the most mechanical kind of informational lift (e.g., this is the moment when they became a team). But the movie survives that, and furthermore survives the uttering of my favorite camp line from movies about the struggles of a misunderstood genius--"This is madness!" (I've heard it as early as the 1936 Alexander Korda production Rembrandt, starring Charles Laughton as the painter, but it's got to be older than that.)
So, although I'll admit that the corny high points are goosebumpily effective, I also have to say that they're not really distinguished. What's distinguished is Kurt Russell's performance as Brooks. Russell singlehandedly anchors the movie's realism. He keeps his head down, way below the romance, and plays nothing but the man who has the will to put into practice an idea that requires the cooperation of twenty unruly boys. Without gush, Russell makes you see that Brooks's way of working is a creative process. There's nothing extra and there's nothing missing in his performance, which is totally unified and yet not monotonous. This is as honest as acting gets, a real reproach to awards-grabbers like Sean Penn and Russell Crowe. Russell makes you feel that earning the gold is at least as important as getting it.
The script keeps bringing on Brooks's wife to round his character out with the things he couldn't plausibly say directly, and Russell is even able to make her comments seem plainly true without disturbing the singlemindedness that is Brooks's strength. (It also helps that Patricia Clarkson brings her own gingery style to the role of the wife, a classically thankless role composed alternately of nagging and admiring-from-the-sidelines. It's a minor miracle that you never regret her presence.)
Finally, it's interesting to compare Miracle, that ultra boy-movie, to Robert Altman's The Company, which is also about communal effort, in this case the rehearsal and performance regimen of the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago. Whereas Miracle presents romance by means of plodding realism, Altman dispenses with the romance (in a ballet movie!) and is instead relentlessly observational. Neve Campbell is the nominal star, but Altman has never so thoroughly diffused a central story, which is cut up and merely glimpsed on the margins of the Joffrey's working routine. Shooting the company's preparations for performance Altman focuses on all the details that are so hard to get right, in order to set us up for the transporting moments when the difficulties seem to have melted away and the dancers realize the choreographers' visions.
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