Red Army

A history of Russian ice hockey over the past several decades. The title is from the alternate name of the national team—the “Red Army Club”—so-called because all team members were also members of the Army. The film covers well the relationships among the hockey team, the government (including the KGB), and Russian society—and, as Russian society opened up, the NHL. Those interviewed include participants in all those sectors and, most importantly, Viacheslav Fetisov, a hockey star who beat his own path. I found this a greatly appealing and engrossing film, and I don’t even like hockey. Polsky sometimes exhibits a disarming amateurism in his interviews when his subjects seem reluctant to speak, while at other times drawing uninterrupted, emotional, focused declamations. It seems he had some Western-centric, going-in assumptions that weren’t entirely verified, but good for him that he made the movie to which his subjects led him. Enormous credit also to Polsky and his editors for extensive montages of photos, clips, music from multiple sources, and fast edits that impart movement and invite engagement. The one smirch is failing to reveal Fetisov’s stake in what we are seeing until near the end; doing so would have helped explain why his earlier answers sometimes have an air of guarded ambiguity about them. All in all, though, this is an impressive look at the club that came out on the short end of the U.S. Miracle on Ice.

Red Army illustrates a masterful balance of telling stories that otherwise would (rightfully) battle each other for attention, coupled with a precision integration of those stories to create a well-paced, cohesive narrative, and wrapped in a terrific collection of clips, pictures, and hockey highlights. All credit to writer/director Gabe Polsky for taking what could have been a half-dozen solid independent documentaries and turning it all into one lithe, 85-minute trip to a past that feels like forever ago, yet one so many of us lived at least part of. This is a can’t-miss doc for laypeople and puckheads alike.