Leatherheads

Renée Zellweger in "The Sarah Larson Story"

Grade: C +
Director: George Clooney
Starring: George Clooney, Renée Zellweger, John Krasinski, Jonathan Pryce, and Stephen Root
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hour, 54 minutes

Having learned at the feet of his sometimes filmmaking partner Stephen Soderbergh and their genre throwbacks The Good German, Solaris, and the Ocean’s series, George Clooney the director now revives his third American decade in three films with Leatherheads. The failing Clooney takes from his years of Soderbergh schooling is a penchant for replicating a particular Hollywood era, not a particular historical era.

Set in the roaring 1920s, Leatherheads revisits the nascent epoch of professional American football, when college teams played in stadiums filled with thousands of rapid fans while their pro counterparts practiced in cow pastures with rosters comprised of drunken louts and out-of-work blue collar laborers. In order to revive the near-defunct Duluth Bulldogs, their aging star, Dodge Connelly (Clooney), entices the top college star, Princeton’s Carter “Bullet” Rutherford (James Krasinski), to leave school and join the Bulldogs in exchange for a lucrative payday.

This is the sort of movie-by-numbers in which the soused beat reporter is named Suds and Renée Zellweger can only squint bit, purse her lips, and channel Roxie Hart, this time under the guise of a sassy newspaper journalist named Lexie Littleton. Lexie is tapped to unearth the less glamorous truth behind Carter’s war hero background, but in so doing she bedazzles both Carter and Dodge.

Leatherheads was filmed throughout North and South Carolina, especially the Salisbury and Winston-Salem areas, and cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel illuminates the locales with a soft glow and vivid palette of yesteryear. In that same vein, Clooney tries to replicate the staccato repartee found in the screwball comedies of Howard Hawks and George Cukor: with its batty love triangle, think a gridiron version of The Philadelphia Story. However, this ain't Cary & Kate - this is the sort of blindly carefree confection where Carter and Dodge can pummel each other in the face for a half-hour without either suffering even a scratch, while two smooches with Lexie leaves lipstick smeared across Dodge’s entire mouth.

As in Irreconcilable Differences (and, increasingly, everything else he does), Clooney again emulates a breezy Cary Grant, except this time by way of Everett from O Brother, Where Art Thou? As the amiable, hunky Carter, Krasinski comes off like a holdover silent-movie actor struggling with the transition to talkies. And, Zellweger is just there as the Girl Friday, unblessed with a script not sharp enough to compete with Clooney’s resplendent personality.

A subtext celebrating the bygone era of pure, hardscrabble sports before it became infected by “rules” and other superfluous influences – epitomized here by a super-agent played by Jonathan Pryce – falls flat. Like the two teams competing in the climactic big game, Leatherheads remains stuck in the mud.

Neil Morris