Like Thomas McCarthy's 'The Visitor', Neil Jordan's 1991 film 'The Miracle' is bursting with unspoken feeling and intense yearnings, and traffics in a kind of emotional currency that's too uncomfortable, or perhaps just too subtle for a lot of people. And like 'The Visitor' few people actually saw 'The Miracle'--now the film isn't even on DVD, a real shame--this is a perfect candidate for the Criterion Collection treatment. It's not a film that should be encapsulated but rather experienced--I will say it's about the pull and danger of imagination and storytelling, and the pain and liberation of discovering, at last, the truth behind deeply buried family secrets. It's also very much about music as a potent communication of things unspoken, as in this scene with a luminous Beverly D'Angelo singing 'Stardust'.
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