The Damned United
Studio: Sony Pictures Classics
Rated: R
Cast: Michael Sheen, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Spall, Colm Meaney, Henry Goodman
Director: Tom Hooper
WorkNameSort: Damned United, The
Our Rating: 3.00

Be careful of the toes you step on today, because they might be connected to the ass you have to kiss tomorrow. In The Damned United, toes are stepped on and asses are kissed, but it’s not so neat and tidy as to be connected in any way.

Brian Clough was the real-life football (aka soccer) manager who took Derby County, a low-rent Division II team, to the top (Division I) of European soccer in the 1960s, at a time when Leeds United was the dominant, unsportsmanlike force in football. Clough led his team with toughness, class, dignity and a burning fire in his gut fueled by his hatred for his moral opposite, the revered Don Revie, who snubbed Clough at their first meeting. When, at the beginning of the film, Clough takes Revie’s abandoned post at Leeds, Clough goes national (and quite public) with his venom, including enmity for the team captain of the group he’s just inherited. Just as Revie never kisses the ass connected to Clough’s toes, Clough never bends in his disgust toward his own team. Clough will grovel, however, at the feet of his silent partner, Peter Taylor, whom he takes for granted until Taylor’s no longer by his side.

As Clough, Michael Sheen delivers his third remarkable performance in as many years, after his portrayals of Tony Blair in The Queen and David Frost in Frost/Nixon. It’s too easy to dismiss Sheen’s work as basic mimicry; in fact, Sheen’s Clough is his most intricate work thus far. He chews on Clough’s vitriol like an overdone steak in private, but as the film progresses, it seeps to the surface slowly, only suppressed by his well-manicured hubris, until the sweat on his brow is practically purple with hidden revulsion. It’s a heretofore unseen and welcome quality in Sheen that will serve him well when he reprises his Tony Blair for that figure’s final Bush-strangled act in 2011’s The Special Relationship, and I can’t wait to watch it come out of him again.

Speaking of that forthcoming movie, written by Peter Morgan, as was The Damned United, the diminishing returns from Morgan’s work is worrying. After bursting onto the global film scene with back-to-back scripts for The Last King of Scotland and The Queen, Morgan’s adaptation of his own play for Frost/Nixon felt rudimentary, and his adaptation of The Other Boleyn Girl was simply bad. The Damned United, as a film, spends too much time laboring over, and tediously overstating, its themes. Most of that falls on poor Timothy Spall, whose dialogue as Peter Taylor consists of so much lampshading that you half-expect him to yell at Clough, ‘The point of your journey is to learn humility and I’ll tell you when it’s time for that!â?�

This article appears in Nov 11-17, 2009.