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Clooney and Krasinski might play on the same team but they seem to be in two different movies

Leatherheads: Good Intentions Go Awry When This Promising
Screwball Comedy Splits Into Two Movies

There’s a climactic point in Leatherheads where football maverick Dodge Connelly (George Clooney) learns that he will have to play a “clean” game from this point forward, meaning no more low-brow moves like “putting the pig in the poke” or “the crusty bob.” If you’re wondering just what “pig in the poke” or “crusty bob” actually means, don’t expect the screenplay to provide any answers: it never actually bothers to explore the mechanics of “dirty” football with any depth or specificity but then asks us to care when the game as Dodge knows it is jeopardized. In its final third, Leatherheads suddenly acts as if it’s about the clash between the true spirit of rough-n-tumble football and the more sanitized, rule-inhibited version of football that plays on our television screens today. All well and good – except for the glaring fact that just about none of the preceding action captures these warring dramatic values at all.

No, the first two-thirds of the movie deals more primarily with Dodge’s bankable star recruit Carl Rutherford (John Krasinksi) who has shamelessly promoted himself as a war hero under false pretenses. The script initially makes it quite clear that we’re to see Carl as an unscrupulously smooth operator, a man that flashes his calculatedly boyish grin to charm all the swooning ladies into his bedroom. Then, quite suddenly, and without explanation, the movie double-backs on itself to suggest that Carl is actually a more humbled unwitting prisoner of the publicity machine around him. It’s a strangely abrupt character shift seemingly designed as a means of halfheartedly explaining the question of heroism: do true heroes exist or does society simply create them to fulfill some unmet collective need? This story gets complicated by star reporter Lexie Littleton (Renee Zellweger) who unapologetically sets out to expose Carl’s true cowardice – only to then suffer her own inexplicable crisis of conscience about making her career off someone else’s downfall.

So, Leatherheads has two distinct subplots – one that questions the very institution of heroism and the other that explores the cost of cutthroat professionalism – and neither one of them has anything to do with Dodge’s quest to preserve football as a professional sport. In essence, Leatherheads is really two movies forcibly clobbered together into one scattered script. And the main cost of this divided narrative is that the supposed heart of the story (football) is nowhere to be found. The only way we can care about the final ultimatum between dirty and clean gamesmanship is if we have watched Dodge fight tooth and nail for the sake of football, if his every action on screen has gone toward keeping football as he knows it alive and well. This isn’t the case – once Dodge successfully recruits Carl, he does little else but give Lexie moon eyes until the third act. In point of fact, Dodge knows Lexie has set out to expose Carl – a scandal that could jeopardize Carl’s reputation and therefore the success of his team– and doesn’t even seem to care! You would think that Dodge would show a little more concern for the well-being of the star player who is single-handedly responsible for his continued career.

George Clooney spends more time giving moon eyes than fighting for his crusade

In order for Leatherheads to work, we need to understand exactly what dirty football means to Dodge on a personal level. We need to know why this game matters so much to him and, by extension, why this game should matter to us. What does dirty football represent on a broader level? What values does it embody? What does dirty football mean for the men that play alongside Dodge? The football gets so relegated to the sidelines that there’s no specific emotional connection to it. In some scenes, Leatherheads seems to suggest that old-school dirty football captures some kind of respectable, plucky spirit far superior to that of a clean game; in other scenes, however, it’s suggested that dirty football is a crude con employed by immature men that don’t want to learn an actual trade.

Think about other sports-minded movies: in A Field of Dreams, baseball represents the need to heed your deeper spiritual calling; in A League of their Own, baseball represents the drive to break out of oppressive social molds; in Wildcats, football represents the need to defy the odds. In each of these movies (and more), the hero gives his all to the sport and, by extension, to a deeper personal crusade that resonates within us all. What does football in Leatherheads represent to Dodge and his team? It’s tough to say: Dodge spends more time chasing tail and envying Carl than he does pursuing the game; meanwhile, his peers - the men that he initially fought so hard on behalf of - are nowhere to be seen, they remain absolutely faceless and voiceless throughout the movie. Leatherheads would fare much better if it established just what ideological code football is intended to embody and then created a story that allowed Dodge to continually fight on its behalf (not just in the first and third acts).

It actually could have been quite easy to align a seemingly incongruous character like Carl Rutherford into Dodge’s quest to preserve football: Dodge is a man whose idea of football seems to mean winning at all costs – even when it involves underhanded plays that far exceed the limits of traditional rules. What if the movie more fully committed to the idea of Carl as an unwitting victim of publicity and designed it such that Dodge were the one to engineer his heroic war record? What if Dodge were the one to create a hero as a means of receiving financing and packing in the stands? Then Dodge would have a die-hard investment in keeping the myth alive; and when Lexie Littleton arrives on the scene to expose the conspiracy, they could engage in a battle of wits trying to undermine the other. Dodge would work tirelessly to protect his created star and, by extension, his football team. Now Dodge’s relationship with Lexie is entirely motivated by his drive to save the team – and it would make sense that her plucky spirit would ultimately appeal to him on a romantic level – because they’re made of the same ideological cloth.

In this way, the movie now resonates with the concept of “dirty gamesmanship” and all the possible values that it might embody. Maybe dirty football represents sticking it to conventional society, maybe it means bucking tradition or creating your own luck, the possibilities are endless. It also provides a great opportunity to show how dirty gamesmanship can go too far: Carl could transform from an initially humble hero to the shameless self-promoter that we see at the beginning of the movie (only now his arc would make sense). Carl could grow so egomaniacal, in fact, that he could hold the team hostage with his star persona. Maybe at that point Dodge would work to undermine his star as a means of facilitating a fall from grace that would generate even more publicity. The gist here is clear: Dodge’s love of the “dirty game” permeates every major story sequence and snowballs into a series of increasingly high-stakes action that provoke considerable risk. This isn’t a man who just does the occasional “pig in the poke” or “crusty bob” on the field but an impassioned gamer who approaches every facet of life with the same zeal for winning at all costs.

Leatherheads is a case of really good intentions gone awry. The director, writers and actors all clearly embrace this chance to create an old-fashioned screwball comedy. Unfortunately, the movie remains undercut by a failure to create a clear point-of-view when it comes to football and a subsequent digression into dramatic material that wanders so far astray from the story promised in Act I.

April 15, 2008