I guess when you make a football comedy that doesn’t quite deliver on its promise, the way actor/director/uncredited rewriter George Clooney did with Leatherheads, you pretty much know the headlines you’re doomed to get. If I had a nickel for every newspaper that went with “George Clooney fumbles”... well, I could probably afford to buy the Duluth Bulldogs, the struggling 1920s pro football team whose desperate attempts to scare up fans make up the bulk of the film.Clooney plays Jimmy “Dodge” Connelly, the team’s aging captain, a completely untrustworthy hard-luck schemer who’s sort of like Everett Ulysses McGill, Clooney’s rascally character from O Brother, Where Art Thou?, but with a touch of Danny Ocean’s smarts, and his skill with the ladies. It’s 1925, and pro football is in its infancy: there’s no rulebook, but no fans either, and the games are played by a motley crew of underpaid farmboys, overgrown schoolkids, and assorted knuckleheads looking for any alternative to working in the mines. The games are played in muddy fields where the livestock often outnumbers the human beings—and unless Connelly figures out a scheme to attract bigger crowds, the Bulldogs will soon be playing their final game. (As the film opens, the Bulldogs have to forfeit a game because they’ve lost their football and they don’t have a spare.)
The scheme Connelly comes up with is to convince Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski, from TV’s The Office), a college football sensation who’s also a war hero, to join the Bulldogs, in hopes that he’ll bring his enormous retinue of fans along with him. The plan works: soon the Bulldogs are filling arenas, but matters are complicated by the presence of Lexie Littleton (Renée Zellweger), a hardboiled newspaper reporter determined to prove that Rutherford’s hero act is a fraud.
The scenes between Clooney and Zellweger are the best thing in the movie—their banter might not be in the same league as His Girl Friday, but my God, what is? Their first encounter in a hotel lobby, during which Clooney alternately flirts with Zellweger, trades insults with her, and pretends to be so engrossed in the copy of the Ladies’ Home Journal that he’s picked up at random from the table in front of him that he can’t even be bothered to talk to her, generates plenty of comic fizz on its own terms. How refreshing it is to see a woman in a romantic comedy who’s actually allowed to say things every bit as clever and funny as the man! Usually, all the woman gets to do in these things is laugh at the man’s jokes and maybe fall down a few times. And I know lots of people can’t stand Zellweger—yeah, yeah, I don’t know what’s up with the squinting either—but she’s got a tart, persnickety quality that makes a nice contrast with Clooney’s smooth underplaying. And she wears the period costumes well—what other contemporary actress looks as right as she does in vintage lingerie?
Too bad the bulk of the film consists of a lot of huggermugger surrounding Carter Rutherford, a character who never comes into focus (Krasinski can’t seem to decide if he’s playing a cocky spotlight hog, or just a dumb kid who’s gotten in way over his head) and whose presence doesn’t really lead to any interesting plot complications other than an oddly undercooked love triangle between Carter, Lexie, and Dodge.
The whole “phony war hero” angle seems intended to recall Preston Sturges’ Hail the Conquering Hero, but Leatherheads lacks Sturges’ wild, unflagging comic energy or his affectionate eye for the absurd extremes of American behaviour. (That said, there’s a couple of supporting characters here that Sturges would have been proud to have invented—especially Stephen Root’s drunken sportswriter and a delightfully uncouth flapper played by Heather Goldenhersh.)
It’s all a little too mild, a little too amiable, a little too content to bask in its own nostalgia. My God, you’d think it was a film about baseball.
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