Leatherheads

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Leatherheads a recent comedy about the early days of professional football in the US. Starring George Clooney and Renee Zellweiger, it was directed by Clooney.

The story is set in 1925 when college football is a popular sport but almost nobody is interested in professional football. Clooney is ‘Dodge’ a middle-aged man who is the star of the Duluth Bulldogs which is a joke of a team, but then again, all the pro teams are jokes. In fact the whole league is collapsing, as team after team goes bankrupt and folds. Finally the Bulldogs fold and Dodge is out of a job. He doesn’t have any other skills, either.

But Carter ‘Bullet’ Rutherford is the biggest college football star in Princeton, and a war hero as well. Dodge gets the idea that if he can convince Bullet and his agent CC to take a year off college and play football for the Bulldogs for $5,000 a game (which was a LOT of money in those days) the publicity would pack the stadiums, and the Bulldogs would be back in business.

What Dodge doesn’t know is that ‘Lexi’ Littleton (Zellweiger) is a hotshot reporter for a Chicago paper who’s got the assignment of unmasking the Bullet as a fake war hero; her editor has learned that the story of the Bullet’s heroism is false. Lexi doesn’t much want the job, but the editor insists she’s the best for the story, and if she’ll do it, he’ll give her the assistant editor job she’s wanted for so long.

Dodge and Lexi catch up with Bullet at the same time. Dodge and Lexi immediately hit it off in cat-and-dog manner in the best tradition of romantic comedies, trading witty lines and insults but underneath it all attracted to each other. Dodge manages to talk CC and Bullet into the Duluth team, and Lexi goes along supposedly to do a flattering portrait of Bullet, and our Act 2 begins.

Now what would any romantic comedy be without a love triangle? So Bullet is interested in Lexi too, and she kind of likes him as well. And the team prospers, all the old players quit their jobs as miners or mill workers or farmers, and come back to play, and sure enough the crowds come out to watch the Bullet.

Later on though Lexi gets Bullet to confess the truth of his war hero story. It turns out the truth is a lot like the official story, only Bullet wasn’t brave at all – turns out he got drunk in a trench and passed out; the Germans took the trench but didn’t notice him there; when Bullet came to they were under fire by the Americans and Bullet shouted, ‘I give up!’ in German, surrendering to the Germans. Only they thought he was one of them, and they all surrendered too – to the Americans. (Well, it’s only a comedy.)

Lexi now has the full story, and Bullet tells her he’s embarrassed by the whole thing, only he can’t make his fellow soldiers out to be liars. The whole thing just got too big and ran away from all of them. Lexi goes off to have a drink at an illegal bar (whisky is outlawed in the 1920s) where – of course – she meets Dodge. The two escape a police raid in madcap fashion, end up kissing, and she tells Dodge what Bullet told her.

Bullet goes off to play for the Chicago team for more money, and Lexi goes to print the story. But the Army denies her story, and the Chicago team demands a retraction. Dodge is in Chicago to play against the Chicago team, and he manages by a trick to save Lexi’s career. But the worst thing happens: a new Commissioner of Pro Football is appointed, and he promises the sport will now be played fairly and by the rules – and there will be a lot of rules to come.

So at the base of it all this is a coming of age story, of America, of a lost age of innocence when the sport was played dirty for fun by a bunch of guys who didn’t make any money at it to speak of, without sponsors or agents. And how all that was lost when the sport was forced to grow up and become more a business. Dodge, who’s one of the trickiest of the old style players, is given an ultimatum by the Commissioner: retire or else face fine after fine for doing nothing, and if he breaks any rules, he will be kicked out of football.

All that’s left now is for the two teams to play each other for the movie’s climax. Of course every sports movie has to end with a big game or match to close things off. The field is very muddy after rains all night long, and with the new rules, nobody quite knows how to play, so the score is 3–0 Chicago as the clock is running out. Dodge knows his team will lose, unless he plays dirty. He looks at his teammates and asks them if they are having fun. They all laugh. So he cooks up a trick play totally against the rules. And he wins the game.

But he is out of football.

But he has won the girl, as Lexi consents to be his bride and they ride off together on his motorcycle.

Everything is shot in ‘nostalgia’ sepia and yellow, warm tones. There’s nothing spectacular or even excellent here, but the production is good. The recreation of the period is good. The stars are charming, though Zellweiger’s makeup is pretty garish and I couldn’t quite figure out why all the men were so hot for her; it helped that there were no other women in the cast for competition! The script has its share of jokes, and gags, and physical comedy.

It also has lots of montages. Unfortunately a sports movie is prone to lots of montages to cover this game and that game, as well as passages such as all the players going back to their day jobs, then leaving day jobs to go back to football, and the rise to fame of Bullet.

As a director Clooney does a manageable TV-level job. In an interview with Jaqueline Bissett about her role in John Huston’s adaptation of Under the Volcano she said Huston never failed to place the camera at exactly the right vantage point. Others have said the essence of film directing is knowing where to put the camera. Alas, Clooney does not. There are several compositions here that are so awkward, to say nothing of how poorly they cut together, that I don’t know why they even got left in the movie.

Worth $10? No. Worth my time to sit at home and watch, and chuckle now and then? Yes.

(13 April 2009)