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Leatherheads

LEATHERHEADS



Watch the trailer for "Leatherheads"

Here’s a complaint you will probably never again hear me level at a movie: The problem with Leatherheads is that there isn’t nearly enough football in it. This comedy is being promoted with a poster that had me looking forward to it: A football team of the 1920s huddles together gazing fearfully at the camera. What are they afraid of? Presumably a more ferocious opponent. And with good reason: Their vintage uniforms and leather helmets are clearly ill able to prevent grievous bodily injury. Star George Clooney is one of those faces, and he’s well-suited to comedies. Like Cary Grant, he’s so preposterously good-looking that you want to be able to laugh at him.

Alas, Leatherheads is not football’s answer to Slap Shot, about a losing team fighting dirty in an age less rule-bound than our more enlightened era. Clooney is also the film’s director, and behind the camera he’s never shown much of an affinity for physical comedy. What we get instead is a romantic comedy with far too much of Renee Zelwegger as a tough Chicago newspaper reporter of the sort that flourished in comedies of the 1930s. (Jennifer Jason Leigh did the same kind of character in the Coen Brothers’ Hudsucker Proxy, though at least Zelwegger has the sense not to imitate any specific actress the way Leigh did Katharine Hepburn.) She’s trying to uncover the truth about popular quarterback John Krasinski, whose record as a war hero has been inflated for publicity purposes. Travelling with the team, she becomes romantically drawn to both her subject and Clooney, a triangle that evokes very little in the way of screen chemistry.

Judging from the end result, Clooney seems to have been most interested in a nostalgic recreation of the 1920s, with lots of sepia-toned photography and Randy Newman’s score alternately slathering on ragtime and Dixieland. It’s pleasant to look at and listen to, but very much by the numbers. A pre-climactic scene in which the government’s new commissioner of football pledges that the game will be cleaned up and played by the rules seems to belong on the end of the movie I was hoping to see, one that actually showed all those dirty tricks and rule-breaking. Clooney has a noted and admirable interest in ethics, but if he chose this script for that aspect he severely misjudged his material. Leatherheads could have been raucous fun, but at best it’s a moderate amusement.

m. faust

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