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Leatherheads

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Cert: PG

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Dir: George Clooney. Cast: George Clooney, Renee Zellweger, John Krasinski, Jonathan Pryce

 

Description: Romantic comedy set in the mid 1920s. With professional football in the doldrums, veteran player Dodge Connelly struggles to keep his team, the Duluth Bulldogs, afloat. When he realizes the growing popularity of the sport at colleges, Dodge schemes to recruit star Princeton athlete Carter Rutherford to the team. Meanwhile, plucky reporter Lexie Littleton starts asking tricky questions about Carter's supposedly glittering war record, determined to expose the golden boy as a fraud.

Country: US. 2008. 113mins

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Clooney turns on the charm

 

Romance is in the air: George Clooney and Renee Zellweger

On your bike: George and Renee aim for a Tracy and Hepburn type of screen magic

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George Clooney proved himself a director of real skill with Good Night, and Good Luck, about broadcaster Ed Murrow and the era of the Commie-baiting Senator McCarthy. But this film tests him in an entirely different way. It is an often creditable attempt to make a screwball comedy of the kind once adorned by such as Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.

Set in the Twenties, when college football drew huge crowds but the professional game was almost non-existent, it stars Clooney himself as Jimmy “Dodge” Connelly, who coaches the Leatherheads, and is determined to promote them as money-makers.

But since their games generally degenerate into fisticuffs in front of a smattering of watchers, he has a hard task persuading a rich agent (Jonathan Pryce) to back him. It all changes when golden boy war hero and ace college star Carter (John Krasinski) is persuaded to join the ragtag outfit and raises the roof with his skill and charisma.

This, however, is not a football film. Its real subject is the on-off romance between Clooney, doing a passable imitation of Tracy or perhaps Cary Grant, and Renée Zellweger who tries her best to seem a bit like Hepburn or perhaps Carole Lombard. Clooney relies a little too much on his natural charm to convince entirely, but at their best the pair strike sparks off each other.

Zellweger plays Lexie Littleton, a hard-bitten reporter who is reluctantly sent by her editor to interview the handsome Carter and is determined to find out whether the war hero has feet of clay. She does this in the usual Hollywood way, by romancing him, which annoys Clooney’s older man greatly since, despite himself, he fancies her.

All this is embellished with excellent production values which summon up the Twenties with some flair and with music that reminds us of the good old days when a song was really a song and the backing band was great.

What’s more, the principals do not let the film down, delivering Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly’s slick and often witty dialogue with spit and polish. So Leatherheads is funny, lively and reasonably smart: so far, so good.

But, alas, something happens halfway through to pour lukewarm water on the proceedings. At almost two hours long, the movie should be shorter by at least 10 minutes — but that’s not the only trouble. It’s also the predictability of the storyline, and, added to that, a lack of scenes that hold the attention like the hostile but flirty first one between Clooney and Zellweger. You get the feeling that it is all a bit of a pastiche rather than a real period rom-com.

But it does look good, and it often sounds good too, with subsidiary performances from Keith Loneker and others that are equal to the dialogue thrown at them. The executive producer is Sydney Pol-lack, one of Hollywood’s best, who is now unfortunately gravely ill in Los Angeles.

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