Michael Sheen & Timothy Spall

In most sports movies the big moments are big: Robert Redford's star-spangled mega-homer in "The Natural."

By contrast, the best of many good scenes in "The Damned United," a winner for soccer fans and soccer idiots alike, is a small one. Brian Clough, one-time English footballer turned failed manager of the Leeds United club, spends a match alone in the changing room. Through smeared windows we see, and hear, the crowd roaring approval in between tense, uncertain passages of time. Michael Sheen, who played Tony Blair in "The Queen" and David Frost in "Frost/Nixon," portrays Clough, and he's marvelous, suggesting warring strains of confidence and doubt in his nervous pacing and darting eyes.

Sheen dominates director Tom Hooper's vivid examination of arrogance, pride, Humpty Dumpty-size falls and self-rehabilitation. He is not, however, the whole show. Drama is a balancing act, and one of the great strengths of screenwriter Peter Morgan lies in the way he juggles characters and shifts the expected emphasis from one playing field to another.

Morgan's work for the screen often pivots on a shadowy antagonist, as with dictator Idi Amin in "The Last King of Scotland" (which he co-wrote), or with Richard Nixon in Morgan's own adaptation of his play "Frost/Nixon," or with British royalty as embodied by Helen Mirren in "The Queen." The same strategy applies in "The Damned United" and its use of Don Revie, the successful manager of Leeds United before Clough's disastrous 44-day tenure. The reliable, granite-like Colm Meaney does a fine job with Revie's sneers and smiles, but it's not his story. Nor does "The Damned United" devote much screen time to how Clough and his invaluable assistant manager, Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall), went on to glory with the Nottingham Forest club.

Rather, Morgan sticks to his dramatic guns and gives us Clough, in present-tense 1974 and flashback sequences, as he realizes how much he needed Taylor, and how much his Leeds players detested him. The crucial story here is about a marriage dissolving and then reconstituting. Clough and Taylor are the symbolic spouses (they had real ones as well). "The Damned United" reminds us that backstage characters often have the most to tell, and Sheen and Spall are both first-rate character men who happen to be tackling leading roles.

The grim Yorkshire weather is captured just so by cinematographer Ben Smithard. The movie gives you its little dose of triumphalism in a coda, but one of the chief virtues of this unusually honest sports film is its determined focus on the losing before the winning, and the hard lessons to be learned from it.

 

     RSS

 

"The Damned United" Movie Trailer

 

Receive Movie Reviews
Enter your email address:


Delivered by FeedBurner

 

MPAA rating: R (for language).

Running time: 1:37.

Cast: Michael Sheen (Brian Clough); Timothy Spall (Peter Taylor); Colm Meaney (Don Revie); Jim Broadbent (Sam Longson).

Credits: Directed by Tom Hooper; written by Peter Morgan, based on the book by David Peace; produced by Andy Harries. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

 

Recent Movie Reviews - Films in Theaters

 

Where the Wild Things Are

Where the Wild Things Are
Max Records & Catherine Keener in Where the Wild Things Are

Based on Maurice Sendak's 338-word storybook, Spike Jonze's film strikes minor chords and plaintive emotions where other directors would've gone for the throat. A boy (Max Records) coping with a household unsteadied by divorce sets sail for an island where the Wild Things wrestle with the same clique issues and hurt feelings the boy deals with back home.

 

Jamie Foxx & Gerard Butler

Law Abiding Citizen
Jamie Foxx & Gerard Butler in Law Abiding Citizen

Gerard Butler and Jamie Foxx star in this brutal, preposterous revenge fantasy that taps into a lot of fears about the American legal system. Butler plays a gadget-maker who survives the slaughter of his family and sets out to get even, and then some. Foxx is the politically ambitious Philadelphia prosecutor who lets one of the killers get off easy so the other will be executed.

 

Natalie Portman & Maggie Q

New York, I Love You
Natalie Portman & Maggie Q in 'New York, I Love You'

The ongoing 'Cities We Love' project that began three years ago with 'Paris, je t'aime' continues its global exploration with 'New York, I Love You.' Eleven directors and 16 screenwriters contributed to the omnibus affair. I like the idea of the film more than the film itself; the batting average with the Paris project was a good deal higher. Nonetheless, this one provides some compensatory satisfactions

 

Vince Vaughn & Jason Bateman

Couples Retreat
Vince Vaughn & Jason Bateman in Couples Retreat

Four couples on a tropical retreat think they're in for umbrella drinks and beach time. They're met instead with a stern regimen of 'couples-whispering' tactics. Though it boasts a good cast that also includes Jason Bateman, Kristen Bell and Jon Favreau, 'Couples Retreat' is pretty meager and more than a little depressing.

 

Michael Stuhlbarg & Richard Kind

A Serious Man
Michael Stuhlbarg & Richard Kind in A Serious Man

Set in 1967 in the Minneapolis suburbs, 'A Serious Man' is a tart, brilliantly acted fable of life's little cosmic difficulties, a Coen brothers comedy with a darker philosophical outlook than 'No Country for Old Men' but with a script rich in verbal wit.

 

Chris Rock & Paul Mooney

Good Hair
Chris Rock & Paul Mooney in Good Hair

Comedian Chris Rock's 'Good Hair' consists of two documentaries braided together, one enjoyable, the other enjoyable and provocative. Rock and a film crew covered the 2007 edition of the Bronner Bros. Hair Show in Atlanta and its climactic Hair Battle Royale

 

Michael Moore

Capitalism: A Love Story
Michael Moore in Capitalism: A Love Story

At its best, this uneven work represents Michael Moore at the peak of his argumentative skills. Roughly a third of its anecdotal and illustrative footage hinges on precise details strong enough to support Moore's wider indictments of the Western world's preferred way to make a buck and treat its citizenry. It is the right time to be dealing with these questions

 

Patton Oswalt & Kevin Corrigan

Big Fan
Patton Oswalt & Kevin Corrigan in Big Fan

Starring comedian Patton Oswalt, 'Big Fan' is a poignant, dead-on examination of a crisis in the life of the most die-hard of die-hard New York Giants football fans. Its situations can be outrageous, but its sense of the core reality it describes is impeccable.

 

Ricky Gervais & Jennifer Garner

The Invention of Lying (3 Stars)
Ricky Gervais & Jennifer Garner in The Invention of Lying

In the world according to 'The Invention of Lying,' truth rules because no one has thought of the alternative. First encounters are brutal. And then comes the epochal First Lie Ever. The movie may be softer than you'd expect from Gervais, but the premise is so rich, you forgive the problems.

 

Woody Harrelson & Jesse Eisenberg

Zombieland
Woody Harrelson & Jesse Eisenberg in Zombieland

Honing the dry comic skills he brought to "Adventureland," Jesse Eisenberg plays a kid from Columbus, Ohio, who joins head-splattering forces with Woody Harrelson, having a high old time as humankind's last best hope. It's a strangely high-spirited lark, giving its leading players plenty to eviscerate in between sweet nothings and wisecracks

Whip It
Ellen Page & Marcia Gay Harden in Whip It

Drew Barrymore's feature directorial debut runs on an easygoing mixture of cliches and grrrl-power, and its cast is good company. (Nice to see Kristen Wiig of 'Saturday Night Live' in more than a novelty role.) A young heroine named Bliss (Ellen Page of 'Juno') goes from the world of teen beauty pageants to roller derby competition after meeting a fiercely alluring gang of roller derby queens.

The Boys Are Back
Clive Owen & Nicholas McAnulty in The Boys Are Back

Clive Owen plays a sports columnist in Australia whose life is upended when his wife (Laura Fraser) dies and he must juggle a return to work with a 6-year-old (Nicholas McAnulty) who doesn't grasp Mom's death. His laissez-faire approach to parenting shocks relatives, but the consequences of it don't fully manifest themselves until a son from an earlier marriage (George MacKay) shows up

Paranormal Activity (2 1/2 Stars)
Katie Featherston & Micah Sloat in Paranormal Activity

A middle-class couple (Katie Featherston, Micah Sloat) living in a San Diego subdivision set up a camcorder with night vision to see what's making weird noises in their home every night, and they gather video evidence that something is messing with their relationship

Fame (2 1/2 Stars)
Debbie Allen & Charles S. Dutton in Fame

One's response to this happy, PG-rated remake, which stands in stark contrast to the R-rated pre-"High School Musical" original, probably depends on your personal relationship to the old version. The newer version, with a cast that includes Debbie Allen and Kelsey Grammer, has a sweet spirit and offers only one true moment of inadvertent camp

The Informant
Matt Damon & Scott Bakula in The Informant

In this deliciously deadpan comedy from director Steven Soderbergh, Matt Damon gets a chance to work his sly comic chops in the role of a biochemist who becomes a corporate whistle-blower. Based on Kurt Eichenwald's exhaustive nonfiction chronicle, the film is both outlandish and subtle.

Jennifer's Body
Megan Fox & Amanda Seyfried in Jennifer's Body

Striving for horror, comedy and anti-mean-girl empowerment, Jennifer's Body wants it all. Yet the tone wavers, the direction's slackly indecisive and visually drab, and in the middle of it is a thinly conceived antagonist played by Megan Fox.

Love Happens
Aaron Eckhart & Jennifer Aniston in Love Happens

Aaron Eckhart plays a best-selling therapist and grief guru whose bereavement counseling gig in Seattle is improved when he meets a flower arranger played by Jennifer Aniston.

The Burning Plain (2 1/2 Stars)
Charlize Theron & Kim Basinger in The Burning Plain

Charlize Theron once again plays a damaged woman running from her past. But storytelling tricks make this an intriguing outing for her, with a cast that includes fellow Oscar winner Kim Basinger and John Corbett.