On the Field

If you were a huge fan of British soccer in the 1970s, then The
Damned United is exactly the Brian Clough biopic you’ve been
waiting for. It’s got all the Brian Clough goodness you need, including
Clough’s awesome meltdown with Derby County, the ensuing debacle at
Leeds United, and the heartwarming relationship between Clough and his
assistant Peter Taylor.

But let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that you haven’t
memorized the starting lineups of all the third-division teams for the
last four decades, and you don’t know the specifics of Don Revie’s
unsuccessful World Cup bid, and “Brian Clough” is just a meaningless
string of letters to you. Would you still enjoy The Damned
United?

Quite possibly. Clough’s is an interesting story: He was a
third-division (sort of like minor-league) soccer coach who, in four
years, took his team to the national championships and on to the
European cup. Clough is played by Michael Sheen, who gives his usual
star performance. Since he’s now played Tony Blair three times and a
werewolf four times, Sheen seems like the perfect pick for the part of
one of England’s best soccer coaches. (Soccer coaches are, of course,
3/7 prime minister, and 4/7 were-creature.) Sheen is endlessly fun to
watch; his David Frost in Frost/Nixon and his Tony Blair in
The Queen are both impeccable, but his turn in The Damned
United makes a serious case for not only being his best work, but
also some of the best acting of the year.

He’s backed up nicely by the supporting cast, who were all chosen
for acting chops and not for pretty faces. Timothy Spall, who’s
probably best-known to American audiences as Wormtail in the Harry
Potter movies, but who has 99 other credits, has combined a
blubbery-cheeked sweetness and pathos with an iron-hard pragmatism in
the part of Clough’s sidekick, Peter Taylor. Jim Broadbent—who is
also, like all British actors, best-known to Americans for his work in
the Harry Potter series—gives a spittingly evil performance as
Sam Longson, the tightfisted owner of the team Clough coaches. And Colm
Meaney—who, because he’s actually Irish, has a special
governmental exemption from serving in the Harry Potter
movies—takes the role of Clough’s rival, Don Revie, and gives it
a complexity that far exceeds what you’d normally find in a portrayal
of a hard-nosed sports figure.

But it’s not just the performances that make The Damned
United so entertaining. The story—which, as far as I know, is
true—is completely engaging. The film moves back and forth
between Clough’s time with Derby County’s soccer team, and his later,
brief career with Leeds United.

At Derby County, he took a third-division team (roughly equivalent
to American Double-A baseball) and powered them up into the first
division. But it wasn’t solely his coaching skills that did it: Clough
was motivated by revenge. In 1968, first-division team Leeds United,
led by Don Revie, played, and beat, Derby County. At the end of the
game, according to Clough, Revie did not shake his hand. Clough then
became obsessed with beating Revie, leading to a decade-long struggle
that eventually saw Clough humiliated on live TV.

But even that excellent story is not the biggest draw, at least for
me. I’ll always love the look of the ’70s, but a problem in Hollywood
re-creations of that era is that everything is presented as new and
clean. I’m sure there was plenty of new, clean stuff back then, but the
’70s were also a period of economic depression, and for a lot of
people, the dominant style was chipping paint, institutional hallways
and smoke-stained walls.

And in The Damned United, the seedier side of the era is
perfectly captured. Derby County has the look and feel of a true,
third-rate sports team. The hallways leading to the locker room are
narrow, with cheap paneling painted a fading, chipping, industrial
green. The conference room’s ceiling is lower than Karl Rove, and the
showers are tiled in grime.

And in a perfectly shot sequence, Sheen, as Clough, scrubs those
tiles in expectation of the arrival of first-division Leeds United. He
waits patiently in his cramped home, paneled in thin wood, decorated
with chintzy dishware, a string-art ship hanging on the wall. The
string-art ship, for those born after 1979, was the quintessential
middle-class decoration: an image of a sailboat made by nails and
string. We denizens of the ’70s knew two things: how to make clothing
out of pop-tops, and how to make art out of string.

While the acting and story are impeccable, it’s the artistic
realization of the era that I found overwhelmingly engrossing. Director
Tom Hooper splices in newsreel footage and uses processing tricks to
create an aged-film look on some of the sequences, blending everything
neatly together to re-create an era when professional athletes made
work-a-day salaries; celebrities were essentially ordinary people; and
status didn’t rely solely on, nor demand in recompense, that everything
one owns be plated in gold.

This article appears in Nov 5-11, 2009.