Meatheads is more like it

Not that there’s anything wrong with Leatherheads — George Clooney’s long and arduous look into pre-NFL football via the screwball comedy — it’s just that there’s nothing really right about it either.

It’s all very bluuuuuuuhhhh.

The laughs are mild and camouflaged amid 1920’s anachronism. The dialogue channels Clark Gable and Cary Grant, but rarely succumbs to their spirits. The antics are whacky and purely madcap — like when George and his girl play Keystone Cops with stolen police uniforms — but they go flat, then sour, when left out of the icebox too long. The costumes were great, but when that’s all there is to say that can’t be a good sign.

It all takes place in 1925. Prohibition is well established. Flappers own the night. The Great Depression is on the horizon. And college football is a beloved sport, while professional football is seen as a joke, a dead-end career path for pathetic old timers who didn’t go to college because they were either too poor or too stupid. Adding to their stupidity, by way of brain-scrambling head injuries, is the unforgiving football uniform: minimal padding, lightweight cotton garments and a leather moccasin that goes on the head, thus making the players leatherheads.

The movie is only half sports, like when the football hero must recruit, and then later play against, a person who becomes his friend. The middle section is barely sports at all as the young friend becomes embroiled in a war scandal invented to keep the action off the field. Neither story is very interesting.

The football hero is Dodge Connelly (Clooney), who runs a rag-tag group of knuckle-crackers in the Midwest. Dodge is the unofficial coach, the star player, playmaker, quarterback and also the team’s press spokesman — after every game he dictates the story to the scotch-soaked reporter sent with the team on road trips. With the league in the lurch, it gets financing from a rich sports agent determined to make football the new American pastime with Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski), an ex-college star and a veteran of the Great War. As a soldier, Carter was involved in the capture of a large German force; his heroism creates a scandal when it comes out the whole story may have been fabricated. Carter, an all-American boy with a doughy all-American face, seems innocently caught up in something he’s unable to control.

Krasinski, who plays beloved paper salesman Jim on the American version of The Office, is a likeable enough guy, but, like the movie, he’s very bland. He overacts a tad, but then again, everyone in Leatherheads does. Clooney, who embodies his free-riding debonair with a classical Gable-like swagger, has some good lines that twist and turn on provocative double entendres, but his performance is lost in the period. Or maybe it’s just lost in his directing (yes, Clooney directed Leatherheads).

In trying to imagine his character in a screwball comedy like It Happened One Night, he’s made it incomprehensible. The twitches, the soggy faces, double glances, goofy eye movements … these things might have worked with Cary Grant, but here they’re just outdated and lost in time and space. By referencing other works — mainly It Happened One Night — Clooney has not made an homage, but a series of jokes that now don’t work in two time periods: now and during the screwball period of the 1930s and 40s.

The film does find a nice rhythm with Lexie Littleton (Renée Zellweger), who is a hard-charging reporter sent to unmask Carter Rutherford for her yellowish newspaper. Zellweger, facial contortions and all, is charming enough for me to mention that she’s does very well in roles set in the 1920s — first Chicago and now this. But her character’s war scandal threatens to derail the real story, that of Dodge and Carter’s football teams, which meet in muddy calamity by film’s end.

The football scenes are like every other football movie ever filmed — lame — albeit in period football uniforms, which provides a fun new twist. But if you want to see it done better, please check out Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman, a film that uses the same football outfits but not because the costume department had a large budget — The Freshman, one of comedies forgotten gems, was filmed in 1925, the same time period Leatherheads claims to represent.

Leatherheads is not a terrible film, although it is terribly disappointing and terribly plain, and also terribly frustrating to see George Clooney flounder on something that had so much more potential as a modern-day comedy than a throwback to screwball comedies.