Friday, April 4, 2008
Movie review: Leatherheads
George Clooney directs himself - and that guy from The Office - in a movie about the dawn days of professional football.
Leatherheads
Dodge Connolly, a charming, brash football hero, is determined to guide his team from bar brawls to packed stadiums. But after the players lose their sponsor and the entire league faces certain collapse, Dodge convinces a college football star to join his ragtag ranks. The captain hopes his latest move will help the struggling sport finally capture the country's attention. Welcome to the team Carter Rutherford, America's favorite son. A golden-boy war hero who single-handedly forced multiple German soldiers to surrender in WWI, Carter has dashing good looks and unparalleled speed on the field. This new champ is almost too good to be true, and Lexie Littleton aims to prove that's the case. A cub journalist playing in the big leagues, Lexie is a spitfire newswoman who suspects there are holes in Carter's war story. But while she digs, the two teammates start to become serious off-field rivals for her fickle affections. As the new game of pro-football becomes less like the freewheeling sport he knew and loved, Dodge must both fight to keep his guys together and to get the girl of his dreams. Finding that love and football have a surprisingly similar playbook, however, he has one maneuver he will save just for the fourth quarter.
Source: Cinema Source
I'm not a big sports fan - except for the parts that involve eating salty snacks and drinking foamy beverages - but I do like to be entertained. I'm happy to report that George Clooney's latest directing effort - Leatherheads - should appeal to both camps.
For the rabid sports crowd, consider that the script was penned by Sports Illustrated senior scribbler Rick Reilly. Now, any guy who manages to derive millions of dollars from his writing automatically gets my respect, but in addition it turns out Mr. Reilly knows how to inject snappy and amusing dialog into a script. And presumably whatever he doesn't know about the historical game of football, his co-writer Duncan Brantley (another SI veteran) does.
For the rest of us (i.e., those looking to be entertained) there's the likable and ever-more-craggy George Clooney in the lead role of Dodge Connelly, a small-time player on a small-time team in the small-time, loosely-organized world of professional football. This is 1925, and college ball is king, attracting gigantic crowds across the country while the pro teams struggle to fill a single row of bleachers.
Speaking of bleachers, Dodge's team - the Duluth Bulldogs - are sponsored by a local starch magnate, whose funding is sporadic, leading the coach to wonder where their next pigskin is coming from. Dodge and his fellows may be known for their trick plays, but they're also solid in the basics, outscoring their opponents through grit and determination.
One area in which they're lacking - to the chagrin and potential disabling of running back Dodge - is blocking, and to remedy that they've just hired on a size XXXXL high school kid from podunkville whose talents as a place kicker leave much to be desired, unless you're looking to take out the entire brass band of the opposing team. (Their lugubrious horn-blowing comes to an abrupt end during an ill-fated field goal attempt.) But to heck with the kicking, this kid has a knack for cold-cocking opposing tacklers with a wicked right cross, so he's hired.
Meanwhile, back at the offices of a major Chicago daily, upstart female newshound Lexie Littleton (Renée Zellweger, in feisty/sexy mode) wants the assistant editor's job, but to get it she'll have to pull an insider play on war hero (and now wildly-popular college football star) Carter "The Bullet" Rutherford (The Office's John Krasinski). Turns out Lexie's editor has learned that Carter's hero background - which hinges on his capturing, single-handedly, an entire platoon of German troops - has been largely manufactured. The country, and the country's advertisers, love this guy, so what better story for a newspaper to pursue than the one that will result in the slats being kicked out from under him? It's the sort of scoop Baskin-Robbins couldn't dish out in their wildest creamy dreams.
Lexie meets up with Dodge in a swank hotel lobby while they're both attempting to meet Carter - she for purposes of finagling the truth out of him, and he to pitch a scheme that will have the fresh-faced wunderkind raking in the dough while playing football professionally. With the consent of Carter's agent - the slimy yet sharp as a tack CC Frazier (Jonathan Pryce) - both Lexie and Dodge set themselves up to get exactly what they want from The Bullet, with all parties decamping to the train station and thence points northwest.
En route to Duluth, Lexie - in slinky red wrapper with lip gloss of the self-same fiery hue - lights a fire under the reptilian hind brains of both Dodge and Carter, with Carter getting the upper hand by virtue of the wholesome yet frisky newsgal's assignment. But when Dodge ends up dodging into her sleeping compartment (nothing fishy, strictly business and all that), a relationship based on mutual worldly-wise respect - with a soupçon of undeclared attraction lurking behind the berth curtains - is born.
A Joplinesque ragtime score provided by Randy Newman plays accompaniment to the witty banter and wacky football action - and we haven't seen athletic getups like these since that episode of the Three Stooges where Moe, Larry and Curly masquerade as three out of the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame. Which is to say that the era is effectively invoked, with dames sporting hats like inverted velvet buckets and gents looking dapper in swank suits and Brylcreemed hair. In matters of fisticuffs, Marquess of Queensberry rules apply, and motorbikes with sidecars are all the rage.
Filmmaker Clooney ladles on the style, employing faux sepia newsreels to record the winning ways of the Duluth Bulldogs (and, later, the legal wrangling surrounding the newsbomb Lexie eventually drops on Carter). There's an elegant sequence involving a silhouetted kiss in a department store window, and an amusing Keystone Cops interlude wherein Dodge and Lexie borrow the uniforms of out-of-action coppers to escape a speakeasy bust.
It's the way of the (capitalist) world: when money appears on the sports horizon, regulation can't be far behind. And so it is that, as the presence of whiz kid Carter Rutherford attracts big paying crowds to the newly-invigorated ranks of professional football, the government appoints a commissioner and imposes a book of rules. Commissioner Pete Harkin (Peter Gerety) wastes no time putting notorious rulebreaker Dodge on notice that his first infraction of the rules will be his last play as a pro baller. But with the championship on the line and time running out on the game clock, Dodge has one last gadget play up his mud-encrusted sleeve.
While two of the three story lines (the love triangle; the de-mystifying of an American hero) prove more mundane than marvelous, the third one involving the rough-and-tumble dawn days of the quintessential American spectator sport - plus the witty repartee and sharp performances - make Leatherheads a worthy pastime.
ANOTHER WAY TO SAY "GET LOST": "I didn't come over here to be insulted." - fresh guy in hotel lobby, to Lexie
"Oh? Where do you usually go?" - Lexie's rapid-fire reply
