Are you ready for some football?
The Damned United / In The Damned United, Michael Sheen portrays his third major historical Brit figure, after playing Prime Minister Tony Blair in The Queen in 2006 and David Frost in 2008’s Frost/Nixon. This time around, he’s Brian Clough, a British “football” coach both revered and reviled for his career, and more importantly, for 44 particular days. Let’s get this out of the way right now–Sheen is so good in each of these roles, one wonders what Englishman Sheen can’t play when teamed with screenwriter Peter Morgan. Those who might decide to pass on the film due to unfamiliarity with the game or the subject matter forfeit what makes sports movies fun–a feat more remarkable for how little of the actual sport is shown.
Few will deny that Clough was a talented coach and also a bit of a braggart, and the 44 days during which he led the top team in the country, despite the fact that he seemed to loathe the team and its players, forever lives in infamy. But it’s in the getting there that the thrill resides.
Teamed with his manager Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall, better known as Peter Pettigrew of the Harry Potter films), Clough takes up residence in Darby for a second-tiered team of nobodies. Through some unconventional decisions and a bit of luck, he and his team face Leeds United, the best brawlers in the business. At first, Clough is starry-eyed and smiles, but after a loss and what he takes as a rebuke from Leeds’ manager Don Revie (Colm Meaney), he begins a rivalry that only exists in his head, alienating all around him. Beating the team is not enough; he wants to shame the lot of them. When Revie leaves Leeds, and Clough gets his chance to tell the players what he thinks of them, he does so unreservedly.
“As far as I’m concerned,” he says, “you can throw all those medals you’ve won in the bin, because you won them all by cheating.”
The players, naturally, don’t take to the criticism, and sports enthusiasts continue to debate whether the games under Clough’s short tenure were lost intentionally. Seeing how the film and the David Peace novel are “fictions based on fact,” there is no clear call on the answers, though a short glance at the long list of inaccuracies posted by rabid fans at [imdb.com] shows that Clough, who died in 2004, still sticks in the craw of football fans.
Director Tom Hooper, responsible for the Emmy-winning John Adams HBO series, weaves this moment in time skillfully, showing his rise and fall not as a chronological case, but as a series of fits and starts, and just when you think The Damned United is going to slide into the easy winning-against-all-odds motif, the film throws a curveball. In the end, it’s not a matter of win or lose, but how the game is played.
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