The Damned United (2009)

Directed by Tom Hooper. Starring Michael Sheen, Timothy Spall, Colm Meaney, Jim Broadbent, Henry Goodman, Elizabeth Carling, Stephen Graham, Brian McCardie. [R]

To be perfectly fair, I know hardly anything about English football (known as “soccer” in my neck of the woods), so I hesitate to criticize a film centered on a specific portion of the life and career of manager Brian Clough (Sheen)—per the closing caption, the “greatest manager the England team never had”—because I had no clue who he was and didn’t know much more than that when all was said and done. There have, no doubt, been numerous films about American sports figures that were similarly given surface examinations that I shrugged off because I knew enough about him or her or them before the movie started. But this motion picture, inspired by a book from David Peace, never offers a compelling angle for outsiders; there’s very little onscreen play, the emotions aren’t primed for feel-good rooting interest, his players leave virtually no impression besides surliness, and the narrative repeatedly jumps back and forth in time from his disastrously short-lived tenure with Leeds United in the mid-70s to earlier episodes in his managing career (spoiling any chance the story had of finding a steady rhythm or offering “Football for Dummies” clarity). How are we supposed to feel about Clough by the end? Since the central struggle is a losing one, how does it earn that aforementioned closing statement? Even his close relationship with long-time assistant Peter Taylor (Spall) is unclear; the antagonistic one between Clough and Leeds’ former manager, Don Revie (Meaney), is much more dramatically fascinating. Therefore, those with intimate knowledge of these persons and events may rate this much higher, but I was left unmoved, uninformed and uninvolved.

50/100