The Damned United (***1/4)

I know little of soccer generally, or English football in particular, although from reading Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch I know that it stirs passions as deep as that of any American Fantasy Football league enthusiast. But I watched this movie, with a coach as its subject, because it represents another teaming of screenwriter Peter Morgan and actor Michael Sheen, the others being The Queen and Frost/Nixon. The director is different (it’s Tom Hooper, of the John Adams miniseries), but the sharp characterization, smart dialogue, and trim structure mark Morgan’s handiwork.

This is the story of Brian Clough’s attempt to remodel Leeds United, among the most renowned teams in England, in his own image, taking over from an equally renowned predecessor, Don Revie. It’s intercut with flashbacks of his first great success, transforming a second-division team from Derby. That Clough is far from a household name in America may limit the audience for the movie, but Clough in his way is as compelling a figure as Tony Blair or David Frost. Anyway, I felt glad not to know how the story would turn out. In Blair and Frost, Sheen portrayed highly successful yet somehow callow men who over the course of the film acquire a certain gravitas. Here he is a character seemingly fully arrived at the start of the film, confident that he can change a team of bullies into gentleman. “They wouldn’t have played that way if they were happy,” he says. Interviewed on television, he says he’s “not the best manager in the country, but I’m in the top one.” I have no idea if this line is Morgan’s or that of the real-life Clough, but it’s both witty and an embodiment of the sort of cockiness that even drew the attention of Muhammad Ali, who knew something about boasting.

The supporting cast includes three actors among whom at least one seems to show up in nearly every English movie. Colm Meaney is Revie and Jim Broadbent the Derby club chairman; they became Clough’s two nemeses. But it is Clough’s relationship with his second-in-command, played by Timothy Spall, that is at the heart of the film. It is not, after all, a film about soccer (on-field action features very little, in fact) or personal transformation, but a true-life, platonic love story.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 10/29/09