An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
Theatre
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Music
The British pop music industry may be eating itself but if Muse are the pick of what it can offer the world in 2010 then British music is in rude health indeed
Muse
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Always been a fan but never seen them live. I was ecstatic to be part of this epic event. WOW!
London,
Derek Malcolm's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Tom Hooper.
Cast: Michael Sheen, Timothy Spall, Colm Meaney, Jim Broadbent, Stephen Graham, Maurice Roeves, Martin Compston, Peter McDonald
Description: Drama charting a tempestuous period in football manager Brian Clough's professional life during the 1974 season, when he leaves behind Derby County to succeed the formidable Don Revie as manager of Division 1 champions, Leeds United. En route to Elland Road, Brian gives an impromptu interview to Yorkshire Television in which he openly criticizes Revie's tactics, allowing the players to cheat their way to each victory. His words cause consternation in and out of the dressing room, where Brian clashes with senior squad members including Billy Bremner, Johnny Giles and Norman Hunter. With the smell of revolt in the air, Brian turns to good friend Peter Taylor for guidance.
Country: UK. 2009. 97mins
Premier league: Michael Sheen as Old Big 'Ead
Man down: the Leeds players turn on Clough on the first day of training
“I apologise unreservedly for being a twat,” says Brian Clough (Michael Sheen) to his old partner, Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall), towards the end of Tom Hooper’s entertaining film about the best football manager England never had. Clough is on bended knee at the time. He has made a comprehensive mess of managing Leeds United without the aid of Taylor and now his former assistant is forcing him to grovel.
The moment would seem highly unlikely if you didn’t know that The Damned United is not a complete fiction. David Peace’s original novel, adapted by Peter Morgan, is sturdily based on truth. Clough’s cheekiness and wit are not exaggerated. Like Muhammad Ali — who once told him to curb his lip — Brian was a law unto himself. He could certainly be an arrogant twat but he also happened to perform the miracle of taking first Derby County, then Nottingham Forest, two very ordinary teams, to the top of the footballing pole.
However, the film, like the book, is an examination of Clough at his lowest ebb. In 1974, having left Derby and fallen out with Taylor, Clough got the job of succeeding his arch-rival, Don Revie, as manager of reigning champions Leeds. He blew it in a mere 44 days, after telling his new charges that they would now have to stop playing dirty football and start doing credit to “the beautiful game”.
Morgan’s adaptation has a much lighter tone than the book and is less full of the social and cultural ephemera of the period. The production design is fine and there are some nice period details — such as the laying out of oranges and ashtrays in the changing rooms — but Clough is given an identity that’s really only part of the man and his time. The darkness of Channel 4’s recent Red Riding series, also based on Peace’s novels set in Seventies and Eighties Yorkshire, is entirely absent.
Possibly Morgan and Hooper made it this way to avoid the film appearing fit only for footballing fans, though what an American audience will make of it even now is anyone’s guess. British viewers will not have to be sports mad to enjoy it, but many will wonder how Clough was able to propel clod-hopping Derby County from the bottom half of the Second Division to top of the First in so short a time before the Leeds fiasco. We are presented with a severe lack of evidence as to what made him one of the greats.
The compensations lie in the playing of a cast headed by Sheen and Spall, who are terrific, and further adorned by Colm Meaney, a dead ringer for Revie, Jim Broadbent as Sam Longson, Derby’s long-suffering chairman, and Henry Goodman as Manny Cousins, the furious chairman of Leeds.
The time will come when Sheen doesn’t have to impersonate a character like Blair, Frost or Clough with whom most of us are familiar. But until then he is good enough an actor to transcend mimicry. This may only be half of Clough, but that half is shown in its full glory.
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Spall too, as the loyal and able Taylor, who was one of the best scouts in the business and left the limelight to Clough, is a thoroughly convincing figure — though there are moments when the pair’s regard for each other seems almost homoerotic. Is this one of Morgan’s little jokes? If so, it risks losing the film’s emotional footing.
The football itself is seen mostly through televised or archive footage, which is sensible since the little we see of the actors on the pitch isn’t that convincing. Certain of the famously unrepentant Leeds cloggers portrayed — whom Clough was trying to reform — carry a little too much fat on their bones to be fully convincing.
Despite these few misgivings, The Damned United is highly watchable, a comedic fiction that happens to be mostly fact. The depth it lacks might have been attained if Stephen Frears, the original director, had not left the project. But Hooper, who made a fine television mini-series about John Adams, has certainly not made a hash of it.
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