Leatherheads: There Will Be Mud

So what’s the problem, exactly? Partly that, for all that looks and sounds right about it, Leatherheads never quite feels right. Moment by moment, the tempo seems a half-beat or so off Sturges and Hawks — it aims for clickety-clack and ends up closer to clickety-clunk. There are even a few long scenes, such as the first extended meeting between Carter, Dodge, Lexie and Carter’s self-interested agent (Jonathan Pryce), during which the pace slows to a near crawl. And for all the novelty of a movie set against the early days of that national religion known as the NFL, Leatherheads devotes curiously little time to on-field action, even though those scenes turn out to be some of its liveliest — the players becoming a blur of muddy motion, the refs consulting their newly minted rule books before making their calls. It’s also, I think, the least visually adventurous of Clooney’s three films as director — an intentional choice, according to the press notes, where Clooney and his cinematographer, Thomas Sigel (who also shot, quite brilliantly, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind), speak of their affection for the “static” filmmaking grammar of the ’30s and ’40s comedy classics. But look closely at those films and you will see that, while their directors never moved the camera ostentatiously, when they did, they did so as elegantly as a camera has ever been moved.

Those aren’t easy criticisms to make, and I suspect that many reviewers will be softer on Leatherheads than they should be. For Clooney isn’t just the “last movie star” — he may be the last of a breed of multihyphenate minimogul (the heir to Warren Beatty and Burt Lancaster) who uses his charm and popular clout to back risky projects, and who has, in what have been generally bleak times for mainstream American movies, done a great deal to sustain our belief in the possibilities of smart Hollywood movies for grown-ups. And besides, screwball comedy is hard and Leatherheads is nothing if not an admirable stab at it — far from Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc? but several paces ahead of the Coen brothers’ The Hudsucker Proxy and Intolerable Cruelty. My point is simply that Clooney makes us expect the best of him each and every time he takes to the field, and Leatherheads is considerably less than that.

Melinda Sue Gordon

North Duluth Forty

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• George Clooney
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LEATHERHEADS | Directed by GEORGE CLOONEY | Written by DUNCAN BRANTLEY and RICK REILLY | Produced by GRANT HESLOV and CASEY SILVER | Released by Universal Pictures | Citywide