The first trailer for The Damned United, Columbia’s film adaptation of David Peace’s literary adaptation of Brian Clough’s non-adaptation as manager of Leeds United in 1974, hit, or, to be more precise, gently bopped TV screens last Friday. Football fans seem generally excited about the movie, but I’m reserving judgment. Brian Clough is cool in the kind of culturally unquestionable way that tends to make filmmakers want to shoehorn their subjects into that continuum of approved visionaries that stretches roughly from David Helfgott to Terence Howard in Hustle & Flow: they’re eccentric, the world hits them hard for it, they hold on, there’s a montage, someone raises his arms on a beach and looks straight into the sun for some reason. That’s really not what I want from a Brian Clough movie.
It doesn’t help my expectations that The Damned United is proposing to take a jittery, fragmentary, stream-of-consciousness novel and filter it through a screenwriter who seems to favor simple lines and clean metaphors (Peter Morgan, who wrote The Queen and Frost/Nixon) and a director who seems to like clearly articulated meanings (Tom Hooper, who made John Adams). I kind of liked both John Adams and The Queen, but if the collaboration reduces the actual dangers of Clough’s personality to a vaguely inspiring story about a genius who was different from everybody else and screwed up sometimes but was still really funny and saw things in his own special way, it’s going to be too bad.
What I’m afraid of, I guess, is that the combined intelligence of the filmmakers will be applied to the task of middlebrow simplification. I fret, on the evidence of The Queen, about overarching stag metaphors.
So I don’t quite know what to make of this trailer. The 70s look pretty good here (if a little too brownly stylized, à la The Last King of Scotland) and I love the Muhammad Ali opening. But the rhythm of the whole piece has a quaintly danceable, Fox Searchlight quality that seems to suggest a movie for New Yorker subscribers on their monthly night out. (The movie isn’t even slated for release in the US yet, I realize.) I’m shrinking in fear from lines like “If you want to be loved, you’re going to have to change”—a Theme, by God!—and, worst of all, “Without me…without somebody to save you from yourself…you’re nothing!” I hope Peter Taylor never said that to Brian Clough, and I know Timothy Spall should never say it to a movie audience.
This all sounds too harsh. It’s just that I’d love for this movie to be good, and I’m afraid that what it’s going to be instead is praiseworthy.
Read More: Damned United
by Brian Phillips · January 26, 2009
Nail. Head. Brian Phillips.
My guess is that non-football people will love this movie while you and me and the rest will bang our heads against some metaphorical, or god forbid, actual wall. But then again, Spall, David Tennant as a Leeds player, can’t be all bad?
Given the standards set by basically the entire portfolio of soccer dramas, I’m pretty sure the trailer on its own could make a legitimate case for being the best soccer film in recent memory.
You make a good point. Though I’m still partial to the bit in Green Street Hooligans where an entire group of hardcore Columbus Crew fans decide to name themselves after an Elijah Wood movie.
Actually The Firm is pretty good, although I’m not sure it really counts as a soccer movie.
Oops, on second view, Tennant plays a Derby County player…white shirts, all the same innit?
Is that definitely David Tennant? If so, we’re looking at a soccer movie in which Dr. Who has a cameo as a Derby player while Don Revie is portrayed by Transporter Chief O’Brien. Is this some kind of science-fiction advance guard? Is there an incredible plot twist awaiting us in the second half?
IMDB says no.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1226271/
I’m more concerned about Tony Blair playing Brian Clough (though Sheen does appear to be quite good in the trailer).
The Damned Utd is garbage and not a true reflection of the real genius. Plain and simple. If Clough were alive, the writer would be bankrupt from the subsequent court case. This is not how a football genius should be remembered.
No no, that’s him. It’s uncredited likely, but that is definitely him 1:18 to 1:20.
In that case, I’m just wondering whether it’s too late to bring in James Earl Jones as the voice of Norman Hunter.
The book was phenomenal, lets just hope the film lives up to it
It is definatly Micheal Sheen not David Tennant cos I was an extra and I can see my arm in the trailer
I think he was talking about the player…
Which one is your arm?
erm well u no when they are saying “but you never win” i am back there somewhere…when the voice says if you wanna b loved” i am in the crowd somewhere lol…and just before the “jim broadbent” title, there is a view of the football players and my arm is waving and i have the exact same picture which i took on the day