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'Leatherheads' goes afield with war-hero angle; not much snap as romantic comedy, sports movie
By Richa Heldenfels
Beacon Journal
Published on Friday, Apr 04, 2008
Somewhere in the muddy plotting that proves to be the downfall of Leatherheads lies a good movie. It bursts forth occasionally, in an inventive bit of humor, or in the banter between stars George Clooney (who also directed) and Renee Zellweger. But the movie stumbles too often.
Set in 1925, Leatherheads draws on a time when pro football was considered far less important than the college variety.
Its biggest touchstone is the early years of Red Grange, a huge star at the University of Illinois, who was signed by the Chicago Bears to aid their struggling franchise; the Bears did better, and Grange made astronomical sums. (According to Robert W. Peterson's book Pigskin: The Early Years of Pro Football, while the Bears grossed about $297,000 in Grange's first season in 1925 — yielding a profit of about $15,000 — Grange alone made $200,000, getting half of the gate receipts as well as endorsement deals.)
In the Leatherheads version, the team in need in 1925 is Duluth's, a scrappy outfit whose star is the aging Dodge Connolly (Clooney). Pro football in general is hurting; there's a reference to Akron's team folding, although in real life Akron was in the NFL a couple of more years.
Dodge decides salvation lies in Carter Rutherford (The Office's John Krasinski), a sensation for Princeton and a hero in World War I. But Dodge is not the only person with his eye on Rutherford; newspaper reporter Lexie Littleton (Zellweger) is writing a profile of Rutherford to set up an expose about his war record.
It's in the latter storyline that the movie begins to fall apart. But before it does, Leatherheads hints at what it might have been in the contrast between the rule-breaking, hard-drinking maverick Dodge and the clean-cut and clean-living Carter, who is helping to usher in a new era in pro football.
It's a change that the screenwriters and director Clooney do not entirely like: a shift toward big money, strict rules and a shiny image, but away from adventurousness and spontaneity. Clooney's directing choices show considerable admiration for iconoclasts — Chuck Barris in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Edward R. Murrow in Good Night and Good Luck — and he might have had a better movie here if he had been content with contrasting Dodge and Carter.
Leatherheads might even have worked as a romantic-comedy triangle with Dodge, Carter and Lexie, and it does grab at the tone of an old-fashioned romantic piece. Clooney is firmly in territory once occupied by Cary Grant and Gary Cooper. Zellweger's performance echoes Barbara Stanwyck, but her exchanges with Clooney don't always snap. (If you want snap, look at Jennifer Jason Leigh and Tim Robbins in The Hudsucker Proxy, a better period piece, from Clooney's sometime collaborators the Coen brothers.)
But the movie has to deal with the whole war-hero story, and it pulls the rest of the movie off course. It also shows some limitations in Krasinski's performance, with Carter becoming more and more of a cipher as his image is stripped away.
And sometimes the lines just make you groan with their sheer corniness. (''You're only as young as the women you feel,'' for example.) I like Clooney and Zellweger enough to find some enjoyment in the movie, but I also kept being reminded of other, better sports movies about scrappy folks and changing times — Bull Durham, for one, or A League of Their Own or Slap Shot.
Rich Heldenfels writes about popular culture for the Beacon Journal and in a blog at http://www.ohio.com. Contact him at 330-996-3582 or rheldenfels@thebeaconjournal.com.
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