Fans of ice hockey and especially fans of the legendary Montreal team (or should I say worshippers) are going to like this film. The re-creation of the period (wartime and postwar Quebec) is very good. The ice action is exciting and some of the editing is excellent. Mostly, patrons will enjoy the title performance by Roy Dupuis, whose tense and interiorized delivery is riveting.
The film's achievement is to present the social and historical setting with restraint. The film could have been iconography, since Rocket Richard was the Babe Ruth and Joe Louis of the French-Canadians (and the fight with Dill was the Schmelling fight). But the movie does not rise to that bait: We are reminded that the greatest player in history, Richard, had to toil over a drill-press to earn a living, even while enjoying fame. The nascent pride of the French-Canadian, and the simmering needs of the impoverished, Montreal working-class, are offered without shouting, which is how they'd have been offered in the period of 1940-1955.
Elements of historical realism are good. Especially wonderful is the depiction of the press of the period and of the French-speaking announcers. Radio French then was so good that it might have been called precious-- a condition of radio employment of the time, and a bit pedantic for a Quebec audience. Also interesting was how circumspect the pride was on the French side. People in the US South and Cajun Louisiana will relate to this.
On the negative side are lots of things related to production value. Basically, the writing is poor-to-pedestrian. Dialog is obvious and clumsy, either needlessly echoing the sentiments of the period or conveying chunks of story that should be organic, not crassly narrated. The film is poorly focused, too, beginning correctly with the Forum Riot, but never truly coming back to that event. The entire movie should have been constructed as a series of flashbacks from one, defining event; it should also have been built with intimate scenes, not group-talk in the locker room. Yet the film skitters all over the map, hopping from one large scoring scene to another, one period to another, sequentially, and without any central moment. This is complicated by a confusing series of hockey games, where the precise stakes of each game (playoffs? regular season? final game??) are not explicit. Since Richard was so driven and efficient, the entire dramatic tension then evolves into his domestic conflict, where he agonized about being a young father putting himself at risk. Yet even that is fuzzy, since there's no one, single, domestic event offered, to help make it palpable. All you then see is the long-suffering wife worrying about what "might happen" to her husband.
Because dialog is so bad, major characters like Dick Irvin drone in melodramatic tones, one-dimensional, where in fact they were more complicated. Finally, the film technique might have better exploited the speed and drama of the games themselves.
This is so far under Raging Bull that we won't even go there, and its techniques don't match the sophisticated Quebec cinema of today. Nevertheless, it's a good film, especially for the Worshippers, and all fans of hockey and even history. Rocket Richard was a phenomenon, not just an athlete, and this film helps us to understand why, with some great acting, and much entertaining and emotionally draining material.
