In the twenties, professional football/gridiron is in its infancy, and things are not looking good.
Attendance is low, play is poor and teams are shutting down.
Veteran player Dodge Connelly (George Clooney) has an idea to re-invigorate the sport: poach the biggest football prospect in the country, college star and WW1 hero Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski).
What they do not know is that ace reporter Lexie Littleton (Renée Zellweger) is investigating Rutherford to find out if his war story is true.
As the trio get entangled professionally and personally, the fate of Carter and the sport is up in the air.
Kind of.
Ah, Leatherheads. George Clooney's third go at bat, and the first in which he took an above-the-title, name-in-lights, starring role.
It also followed his Oscar win for Syriana and the release of Ocean’s 13. Clooney was at a career peak, and Leatherheads feels like his way of showing that he can do everything.
Leatherheads starts a trend in Clooney’s directorial career - the script was written years prior, by Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly as a straight drama about the early days of professional football in the twenties.
Clooney took up the project, and had the idea to adapt the story into a screwball comedy.
The result is a perfect example of miscasting, from director on down.
Good Night, and Good Luck is a dry movie - it is a solid drama told without overt flair. And that works for that story and the theme of journalists aiming for the substance, the facts of the story, in order to beat back fabrication and deceit.
Leatherheads is a movie requiring a different skill set.
The movie is an odd mix, swinging between limp attempts at slapstick physical humor, spurts of repartee and relatively straight historical drama.
And it makes for a frustrating experience because it fumbles the ball (har har) on both the repartee and slapstick.
If you watch any comedy, let alone screwball, there is no dead air.
There is a reason why comedies tend to be under 100 minutes.
Leatherheads is almost two hours long - and it has a lot of air.
The dialogue is inconsistent in style, and when it is aiming for that Sturgess/Hawkes-style sparring it lacks bite and pacing.
And the physical gags are so basic and staged with no feel for timing.
Within this concoction, the cast feel a bit adrift.
With all the actors, it feels like they are jugglers who have to answer trivia questions at the same time
Clooney mugs constantly, failing to recapture the madcap energy of his Coens performances.
Zellwegger is a terrific actress but she does not have the spark for the character or the style of dialogue. In the hands of filmmakers who know what they are doing, she could work but in this role, she is lost.
And John Krasinski is stuck with an undefined role - too earnest to be a goofball fool, and not silly enough to be comic.
The movie is stuck between the source material and Clooney’s unsteady grasp of the movie he wants to make.
He would have been better off just playing the original material earnestly. It might have been less commercial, but a screwball version is not exactly four quadrant.
Too smug for its own good, and unaware of its failure to achieve its goals, Leatherheads ends up being annoying.
The film is watchable, but Clooney’s genre retrofit lacks the deftness and comic sensibility to make it work.
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