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Clough ears: Michael Sheen gives another eerily accurate performance as a real-life character, capturing Brian Clough’s strutting, bouffant arrogance
Real version: Cloughman during his 44-day reign in 1974 at Leeds United
Football movies never work. Fortunately, this isn’t a football movie. The Damned United, which has its West End premiere tonight, is a tragedy and a love story about Brian Clough, who happened to be a football manager. It’s a witty, well-observed period piece in which writer Peter Morgan and actor Michael Sheen crawl convincingly under the skin of a real-life character as they did with Tony Blair in The Queen and David Frost in Frost/Nixon.
Sheen eerily captures Clough’s youthful, bushy-bouffant arrogance, his northern swagger bordering on campness. The time is the late Sixties and early Seventies when the beautiful game was first tainted with thuggery on and off the pitch, and the stink of serious money.
Clough’s a much-loved enabler of underdog second-league teams. But his obsession with the cheating, hard-tackling champions Leeds leads him to an ill-fated 44-day stewardship of the club, which probably cost him the England manager’s job. That’s the tragedy.
The love story is a small, platonic one, between Clough and Peter Taylor, the assistant he took for granted, played with wallflower dignity by Timothy Spall.
The film is based on David Peace’s novel, which put the reader into the seething, alcoholic pit of Clough’s mind. Director Tom Hooper can’t replicate that on screen, so opts for something lighter and more conventional. We get the familiar but distant England of muddy pitches, test cards and power cuts, when ashtrays were laid out alongside the half-time oranges in dowdy dressing rooms.
There’s so much faithful period detail it’s arresting when Hooper scores a genuine visual coup — a chairman’s panelled office goes dim when the windows are blocked by cheering fans. For all its admirable straightforwardness, the film has a confusing structure. It flicks back and forth between Clough’s time at Derby County and at Leeds, his dalliance with Brighton and a holiday in Majorca.
Though we understand perfectly why Clough earned the nickname Old Big ’Ead, there’s little hint of what made him a great manager beyond the odd, inspirational pep-talk.
But then, The Damned United is likely to do well at the box office because it appeals to a crowd beyond the football-crazy. It captures a perfect snapshot of an era and a great English eccentric.
Sheen and Spall are excellent, as is Colm Meaney as Clough’s nemesis Don Revie. Stephen Graham contributes a pungent cameo as a gargoyle-like Billy Bremner, while Jim Broadbent exudes affronted dignity as Sam Longson, the Derby chairman Clough pushed too far.
A win, then, if not a championship performance.
The Damned United opens in cinemas on 27 March.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
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