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Leatherheads
American football is rarely a major selling point for a movie over here - even in the US it doesn't have a very strong box office record. An American football film set in 1925 is even less sexy, but Universal hasn't done itself any favours by holding George Clooney's latest back from the critics. Such timidity only gives the impression Leatherheads isn't much cop. Leatherheads isn't much cop, but it's not the outright disaster the studio seems to have written off. Like too many latterday attempts to resurrect the heyday of screwball comedy in the 1930s it feels forced and divorced from reality - the actors might as well be performing kabuki. I exaggerate, but you get the point; The ratatatat verbal ping-pong that characterized so many great films by Lubitsch, Preston Sturges, Frank Capra and Howard Hawks expressed a brash American optimism and wit, but today's actors come from somewhere else, a place where solipsism and self-doubt have taken the shine off that wiseacre can-do spirit. Clooney - who had a go at this style of comedy in the Coen brothers' O Brother Where Art Thou and Intolerable Cruelty, to mixed effect - has been developing this script with two former Sports Illustrated journalists for more than ten years, and somewhere along the line replaced Steven Soderbergh as director. He also takes the lead role, "Dodge" Connelly, the bull-headed leader of the Duluth Bulldogs, a rough and ready pro football team. In 1925 the pro game barely existed. According to the movie they didn't have a rule book - even a football seems optional as most games degenerate into a ruck.
College football, on the other hand, attracts sell-out crowds. Faced with extinction, Dodge figures out an angle that will transform the sport. He signs up the biggest star on the college circuit, Carter "The Bullet" Rutherford (John Krasinski, from the US version of The Office). The notion that a star player like The Bullet could actually earn money from his talent hasn't been tested before, but if his fans follow him it will be a win-win situation for everyone. Except for one thing. Ace reporter Lexie Littleton (Renee Zellweger) has been assigned to cook the goose that lays the golden eggs. She has a lead that the Bullet wasn't the war hero he's cracked up to be. While this subplot generates the movie's funniest episode - a flashback to the Bullet's valiant efforts in WWI - it also takes the movie badly off course, taking the focus away from the football field just when tensions are developing nicely between Dodge's old-fashioned hedonism and the Bullet's new-fangled regime of curfews and healthy eating. The romantic triangle is a one-sided affair since Clooney devotes far more screen time to his own character than the competition. Resembling a peevish chipmunk, Zellweger talks the talk, but you never believe she'd walk the walk - she's no Rosalind Russell, that's for sure. (Too bad they didn't give Ron Shelton a crack at the script, the Bull Durham scribe might have found her a character to play underneath the attitude.) Krasinski is winning as the lanky, clean-cut young athlete - he's the only one who doesn't seem to be acting in speech marks, and he's a dab hand at physical comedy - but when it comes to the crunch, when he should be wrestling with his conscience or fighting for his woman, the Bullet's simply not there.
Like as not those scenes were shot but hit the cutting room floor as Clooney struggled to bring the script's runaway subplot under control. As it is, Leatherheads feels significantly too long at 114 minutes. With its desaturated visuals and (rather nice) Randy Newman ragtime score the movie seems unlikely to appeal to younger audiences. Older fans will find comparisons to His Girl Friday, Hail The Conquering Hero, Some Like It Hot etc not to the new picture's advantage. Tom Charity 
More information about Leatherheads » Critics' Reviews
Ah, how we miss the days of screwball comedy, when romance lived or died depending on the bite of your banter. Most... read more on www.timeout.com Members' ReviewsReviews Voted Most HelpfulMost Recent Reviews |
David Fear, Time Out