Part screwball, love-triangle romance, part sports comedy, George Clooney‘s third film behind the camera, the period piece Leatherheads, tells the story of American professional football’s “salad days,” and one man’s very self-interested attempts to push it into the public view. Loose-limbed, loquacious and exceedingly affable, the movie checks off many of the boxes of its genre forebears, but comes totally unglued in the final third, when forced to awkwardly try to pay off its tangled inducements.



When his Duluth Bulldogs finish their latest barnstorming tour broke and out of opponents to play, wily, charming owner-player Dodge Connolly (Clooney) turns his attention toward figuring out a scheme to keep alive his dream of avoiding a real job. A jack-of-all-trades who even dictates grand post-game reports to the local reporter, the rakish Dodge sets his sights on wooing into the fold a wealthy investor, C.C. Frazier (Jonathan Pryce).

Frazier’s latest business client is golden-boy Carter “The Bullet” Rutherford (John Krasinski), a Princeton student, football star and war hero who, legend has it, single-handedly forced an entire German squadron to surrender during service in World War I. What Dodge doesn’t originally know, but quickly finds out, is that hotshot, tart-tongued reporter Lexie Littleton (Renée Zellweger), ostensibly there for a fluff profile piece, has in fact been sent by her editor to craft a take-down article on Carter, whose war story they don’t believe. As Lexie gets close to Carter, so too does Dodge to Lexie. Powered by Carter’s stardom, the team is revitalized, but for how long?

Leatherheads‘ screenplay, an old piece penned in the early 1990s by sports magazine writers Rick Reilly and Duncan Brantley, and presumably tinkered with by Clooney and a number of uncredited script doctors, wallows, to largely winning effect early on, in detail (the team having to forfeit a game because of the lack of a ball, and drying laundry on the outside of a moving train) and dialogue. Great fun is had in mocking Clooney as a “middle-aged boy wonder,” and the actor-director and Zellweger share a number of enjoyable, rapid-fire exchanges, their just-concealed attraction masked by surface irritation.

But Leatherheads‘ third act is about as muddy as the action on the field. A few sequences (an energetic bar-room brawl, for instance) seem thrown in merely for affectation, while most others are rife with wan obligation. There are no sharp angles here, no clear delineation of motives, particularly as it relates to Dodge’s feelings about Carter, whom he knows Lexie is angling to take down and yet whom he needs as a public draw for his own financial survival.

That might be fine if Leatherheads made a few different narrative choices, and just wholeheartedly embraced existence as a ramshackle character piece. The problem is that the film also tries to capture the transitional phase of a sport moving from an independent and inherently irresponsible endeavour to a corporate-backed game with rules and regulations. It does this nicely in a few shorthand visual ways, but awkwardly as applied to its characters. For a movie so invested in whimsy and tone to finally end with a conventional “big game” feels disingenuous at best, and even more tacked on given the lack of concrete stakes tied to the outcome.

If the story winds down in disappointing fashion, the role of Dodge is never less than a perfect fit for Clooney, who pulls out his Cheshire cat grin to twinkly, mischievous effect. Yet Clooney the director also does quite right by his other actors, drastically reducing, if not entirely eliminating, Zellweger’s penchant for squinting, and guiding Krasinski (the small screen American version of The Office) through his best big screen role and performance to date.

Technically, Leatherheads is Clooney’s most ambitious film thus far behind the camera, and he and his collaborators ably deliver on all counts. There’s a warmth to the cinematography of Newton Thomas Sigel (Three Kings, X-Men) and a smart, simple, inviting sense of detail to Jim Bissell’s production design, which ranges in scale from intimate (starch, toothpaste and shaving cream ads featuring Carter’s grinning visage) to the massive scope of an Ennis Field practice and game, abetted by a few nice effects shots. Randy Newman’s horn-waggling, tin-pan alley score, meanwhile, serves as optimistic, ironic counterpoint to the hard-knock economic realities so many of the Duluth footballers face. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here.