Luke
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CibbuanoThe Damned United
January 11th 2010 04:30
I won't pretend I know anything about soccer/football... I barely care about sport of any kind (unless the sport in question is the sport of knocking down beers, nyuk nyuk), but that doesn't mean I don't enjoy a good sport movie. I like what sport can sometimes represent (one of my all-time favourite movies is Rudy) and I can recognise why some people invest so much of their lives into it. Anyway, the story of The Damned United concerns a rather tumultuous and short period in the history of the Leeds football club in mid-70s Britain, a 44-day stretch that saw them get a new manager and subsequently drop from the top of the league to second last on the ladder. It's not a tale of Leeds though as it is so much the story of football manager Brian Clough, the man who quashed their status as champions in his misguided efforts to eclipse the reputation of their previous manager.
British TV director Tom Hooper marvellously recreates the period in all it's brown and gloomy glory, complete with chips eaten from newspapers and cutting edge corduroy fashion. The Damned United parrallels Clough's ill-fated tenure as manager of Leeds alongside his against-the-odds rise to glory as the manager of Derby. Clough is clearly brilliant at what he does, but he's also a slave to his own ambition - often to his own detriment, and once he's in charge of Leeds it seems inevitable that he will be undone by his own ego.
After a few large and flashy supporting roles in recent times (Frost/Nixon, The Queen), Michael Sheen is finally given the full breadth of the spotlight as the infamous Brian Clough - a smarmy, button-pushing, brilliant, petty, and cheerfully arrogant football talent with more than a few similarities to Steve Coogan's comical character Alan Partridge. Sheen embraces all the colours of this real life character without fear of whether he'll come out of it sympathetically or not, and creates a complex, unvarnished and frequently unlikeable portrait of a man seemingly intent on melting the wax off his wings. The rest of the main cast (Colm Meaney, Jim Broadbent and Timothy Spall) are as entertaining as always, but it resolutely remains Sheen's movie and he should hopefully get himself a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his work.
Ironically, I found The Damned United to be a lot more interesting than an actual football match. I hear it takes a few liberties with the true events that it's based on, but the themes and performances at it's heart rise above such gripes to create a moving and emtionally vested parable about talent, ambition and jealousy. One for football fans and non-fans alike.
LOWPOINT: One of the promotional posters (not the one I posted above this review) features the tagline, "Based on a True Story of One Man Who Showed an Entire Country What Winning was All About". The movie is NOT any such thing, even if this tagline is taken in a satirical manner it still doesn't make any real connection to the film's plot. Congratulations Movie Marketing Department, you guys just misrepresented yet another good movie.
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