Set when professional football consisted of little more than
“miners and farmers and shell-shocked veterans” beating each other up
in turnip fields, George Clooney’s Leatherheads continues the
star/director’s steady march back through time. Following Clooney’s
first two directing gigs—also period films (2002’s promising
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and 2005’s excellent Good
Night, and Good Luck)—Leatherheads is set even further
back, in 1925, when raucous speakeasies were crammed into back rooms,
fast-talkin’ dames were crack newspaper reporters, and lovable
scoundrels rode the rails.
Or that’s the mythologized version of ’20s America, anyway, which is
all that matters here. A throwback in every sense of the word,
Leatherheads aims to capture the sharp, earnest spirit of Howard
Hawks classics like His Girl Friday (1940) and Bringing Up
Baby (1938). Instead of Hepburn and Grant, though, we get Clooney
and Renée Zellweger, as well as Jim Halpert from The
Office and the goofy, bumbling music of Randy Newman. It’s a
hodgepodge, but it works.
Since his transformation from ER heartthrob to bat-nippled
action hero to Serious Filmmaker, Clooney’s worked with far better
material, but Leatherheads will suffice: Dodge Connelly
(Clooney) is a crafty, charming “middle-aged boy wonder” who plays in
the struggling pro football league, where spectators are as rare as
rules. But just as Dodge bullshits his way into convincing superstar
college football player and war hero Carter Rutherford (a mildly
likeable John Krasinski) to join the league, sexy reporter Lexie
Littleton (Renée Zellweger) decides to prove Rutherford’s not
the all-American hero he claims to be. Drunken fistfights and love
triangle shenanigans ensue.
See that up there? How “sexy” and “Renée Zellweger” are in
the same sentence? What the fuck, right? But it’s true! While Clooney,
as is often the case, is funny and charming, the pinch-faced,
fish-lipped Zellweger somehow manages—at least in her
antagonistic, clever scenes with Clooney—to give
Leatherheads, which often feels rote and familiar, a much-needed
punch. Like the classics from which it draws inspiration,
Leatherheads is a straightforward, inoffensive, unsurprising
crowd-pleaser. And as that, it’s just fine—but considering
Clooney’s record of late, it’s still disappointing that
Leatherheads doesn’t try to be anything more.
