Serving up so much sentimentality
Mawkish and manipulative, The Miracle Season sets out to win one for the Gipper
Needlessly and overly sentimental, relying heavily on a sweeping score to manipulate audiences and tug at heartstrings, The Miracle Season delivers exactly what you’d expect from a movie helmed by the director of Soul Surfer and one of the writers of the Friday Night Lights movie.
The film is based on the true story of the Iowa City West High School volleyball team, who became state champions thanks in large part to their star player and captain, Caroline “Line” Found (Danika Yarosh). She’s bouncy, agile, fun and supportive. Everyone in her small town knows and loves her.
She and her best friend Kelly (Erin Moriarty), also on the team, are typical all-American teens. They’re white, blond-haired, middle-class, Christian and popular. In an early scene, they’re driving a convertible Saab and singing along to Katy Perry’s Fireworks. (This is the first of two Perry songs used in the movie. Roar, well, roars just before a pivotal game in the final act.)
The girls’ coach is the toughlove/soft-centred Kathy Bresnahan (played by the great Helen Hunt, who ought to be mad about the wardrobe department’s choice of high-rise shorts and ill-fitting T-shirts). At the beginning of their new season, coach flaunts the championship trophy in the locker-room, but teases: this championship doesn’t belong to this team. It belongs to last year’s. And almost no team has won two championships in a row. Bresnahan is tough, and just in case you didn’t get that, her signature move — begging for an unintentionally hilarious supercut — seems to be slamming binders and clipboards against desks, benches, chairs, floors, whatever surface is around.
So the girls are pumped and the coach is impatient (oh, and freshly divorced). But Line is the perfect foil for the hard-nosed Bresnahan with her sunny disposition that can’t be shaken. Even when her mom is given months to live, Line emotionally predicts the two will dance at her wedding.
Unfortunately, tragedy strikes when Line is killed in a moped accident; then again when her mother dies the night of the funeral. Bearing the brunt of this emotional turmoil (and doing much of the onscreen heavy lifting in his few scenes), is the family’s patriarch played by William Hurt. When one of his late daughter’s teammates asks the amateur magician if he’s ever sawed anyone in half, he replies (without a shred of irony): “I’m more about putting people together.”
The volleyball team is shaken by the loss of Line. First, they forfeit their games, too emotional to set foot on a court to even practise. Then when Line’s BFF Kelly takes the lead and convinces everyone that playing is what Caroline would want them to do, they lose a dozen games in a row. But they’re empowered by one win at a homecoming game, and one training montage later (hey, they’re improving and getting along), they are contenders for the state championship once again.
If you’ve seen even one movie in your life, The Miracle Season won’t be groundbreaking or exciting in the least. But it accomplishes exactly what it sets out to; inoffensively, succinctly and efficiently in its 90 minutes of screen time — including two (two!) singalongs to Sweet Caroline.