Leatherheads

As charming and affable as George Clooney is, that alone can not save Leatherheads. My trouble with this film starts wondering about the wisdom of a studio that releases a football film during a week that baseball opens and college basketball ends, and it doesn’t alleviate much from there. This is Clooney’s third directorial effort, following Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Good Night, and Good Luck, and it is a distinct step backward. It’s like watching someone with a tin ear conducting an orchestra. Clooney may be a talk-show wit, but he doesn’t have a grasp of screwball comedy.

The year is 1925. Pro football, in its infancy, is played on an ad hoc basis by a motley group in cow pastures in small industrial cities. College football, though, is very popular, and one of the biggest stars is Carter “The Bullet” Rutherford, a Princeton student and war hero. Clooney is Dodge Connelly, the aging star of the Duluth Bulldogs. When his team has to fold, he gets the bright idea of signing Rutherford to play for his team and attracting huge crowds. Why none of the other teams had this rather simple idea is not discussed.

Rutherford has an oily agent who demands a large piece of the pie, and also keeps a tight lid on the embarrassing truth that Rutherford’s war record has been vastly embellished. A reporter from the Chicago Tribune, played by Renee Zellweger, is assigned to dig up the true story, and of course romantic entanglements ensue.

At the heart of it all, this isn’t a bad idea for a film. Pro football in the twenties was probably a very colorful subject, but nothing about Leatherheads rings true. The production values are all fine, and the actors are game (although John Krasinski, as Rutherford, isn’t given much to do and comes across very bland), but it plays like it’s been translated from another language. The script, by two sportswriters, Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly, was supposedly rewritten to a great extent by Clooney, and there’s some unpleasantness in the entertainment news about Clooney and the WGA over credit. If I were Clooney I wouldn’t want to take any credit, because the script tells us that the writers have seen a lot of screwball comedies, like The Front Page and The Philadelphia Story and several other classics, and read a lot by and about the members of the Algonquin Round Table, but I could listen to Beethoven all day long and never be able to write a symphony.

I think the film is trying to create the tension of a romantic triangle between the three principles, but there’s really no suspense over who Zellweger will end up with. It makes the final “big game” scene thoroughly anticlimactic, and also puts forth the dubious suggestion that blatant cheating is somehow honorable.

I was also annoyed by a historical problem with the script. The film is set in 1925, and we are told that Rutherford postponed his schooling to go to war. We are also told that Rutherford is a junior in college. Since World War I ended in 1918, that means Rutherford has been going to college for seven years and still is only a junior. Sometimes having a head stuffed full of facts can prevent me from enjoying simple-minded entertainment.