As a director, George Clooney has clearly learned from the best. The influence of Steven Soderbergh, with whom Clooney has worked six times now as an actor, was all over Clooney’s first two films, 2002’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and 2005’s Good Night, and Good Luck. For his third turn behind the camera, the period football comedy Leatherheads, Clooney switches gears to emulate the Coen brothers, whose third effort with Clooney as star, Burn Before Reading, is set to come out in September.
Clooney’s performances for the Coens have been in lighthearted affairs, and he attempts to recapture some of that sparkle with the 1920s-set Leatherheads, which hearkens back to the screwball comedies of the 1930s and ’40s. Much as the Coens did in the underrated Clooney-starring Intolerable Cruelty, Clooney here sets up a romance between two strong-willed, sharp-tongued people, in this case aging pro football player Dodge Connelly (Clooney) and reporter Lexie Littleton (Renee Zellweger). The two exchange barbs as Lexie works on a story about football star Carter Rutherford (The Office’s John Krasinski), who’s been lured away from the much more popular college circuit to play for Dodge’s struggling pro team, the Duluth Bulldogs.
Written by a pair of Sports Illustrated staffers, Leatherheads offers a frustratingly incomplete portrait of the early days of pro football, positing the proto-NFL as falling apart one week and worthy of a government-appointed commissioner the next. Clooney seems more concerned with period re-creations than he is with sports, though, and much of the gridiron action remains offscreen. When we do finally see an extended match, it’s confusing and not nearly as lively as the repartee between Dodge and Lexie.
That back-and-forth zing is what saves Leatherheads from being terminally dull, since the likeable but bland Krasinski isn’t yet up to carrying a movie himself. Clooney’s old-fashioned movie-star demeanor is perfect for a movie in which he’s called on to channel the likes of Cary Grant and James Stewart, and while Zellweger can’t quite match up to Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, she’s at least on par with her last Roaring ’20s role, as Roxie Hart in Chicago.
The film can’t commit to its screwball ambitions, though, and Clooney’s pacing, crucial to the dizzying exchange of witty rejoinders, is off; scenes consistently stick around for a beat or two longer than they should, like Clooney got caught up in the moment and forgot to yell “cut.” Like any good screwball comedy, Leatherheads ends with an easily predicted marriage, and its two leads deliver in the romance department as well as they do on the verbal comedy.
In the meantime there’s a whole lot of other stuff that doesn’t work as well, including the plodding, drawn-out storyline about Carter’s dubious status as a war hero, which requires Krasinski to project a moral crisis that he just isn’t able to sell. Most of the period detail sparkles, but Randy Newman’s score often overloads on the old-timey cuteness. Where the Coens and Soderbergh effortlessly capture the spirits of classic genres and styles, Clooney the director here seems as desperate as Clooney the actor is casually assured.
There’s a nearly interminable mid-film sequence of broad, cartoonish slapstick that’s completely out of place—which follows one of the film’s sharpest and funniest exchanges, and leads into what’s easily its most romantic moment. That inconsistency prevents Leatherheads from being the breezy delight it sets out to be, but the spectacle of Clooney and Zellweger in a succession of fabulous hats trading ribald insults will at least leave you with something to smile about.
Leatherheads
***
George Clooney, Renee
Zellweger, John Krasinski
Directed by George Clooney
Rated PG-13