George Clooney's third film as director sees him stepping away from television history, with its culture-shaping news titans aggrandized by glorious black and white in Good Night, and Good Luck and its whisper-fringe represented by the game show-hosting fantasist and "assassination enthusiast" at the center of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. Here he's produced a one-off trifle, a relaxed and fraternal period football comedy that with its low-stakes appeal sometimes feels more like a directorial effort from a what-me-worrier like Danny Ocean than from the avowed political conversationalist Clooney. Those expecting an ambitious Hail Mary pass or even something culturally relevant this time around are advised to look elsewhere, while football buffs and Clooneyheads not yet soured on the meta-movie star's palsy-walsy act may find a lot to enjoy.
Leatherheads refers of course to the unprotective slab of cowskin that laid across the scalps of Prohibition-era players, years before the accelerated violence of the game would necessitate the invention of those titanium-strength brain jars, as well as to the Duluth Bulldogs themselves, a ragtag mud-and-blubber squadron of pro ballers at a moment in 1925 when college ball is ascendant and no one sees change on the horizon. Jimmy "Dodge" Connelly, played by Clooney with more glamour-puss poise and smiling than the character description can bear, is the team's captain, its publicist, its Michael Clayton and its manager all rolled into one, but he's not formidable enough to keep the Bulldogs from losing their financing early on in the film, with one lonely backer grousing "there must be a better way to promote starch" before vanishing from the sidelines. The team members are serenaded into unemployment by Al Jolson — "Toot, Toot, Tootsie Goodbye" — and we get one standout, straight-on camera shot of a player slumped down in a mining cart, disappearing back into the blackness of the coal mine from whence he came, but the presiding feeling is that what should have been the just-for-laughs portion of the film has just passed by with very few actual laughs.
Salvation for the Bulldogs comes in the form of Carter Rutherford (The Office's John Krasinski), a college football star and World War I hero — the math doesn't add up, but who cares? — who Dodge thinks can be recruited to the struggling pros and reverse their fortune with his marquee face that sells razors and Pall Malls on billboards. Also interested in Carter is Lexie Littleton, a Kewpie-faced Rosalind Russell imitator played by Renée Zellweger, who like her co-star spends too much time these days swimming in crowd-pleasing breakfast cereal and not enough sharpening her craft, and whose character here suspects that Carter's war heroics are phony and begins cutting in on Dodge's seduction dance, while following covert orders from her boss at the newspaper to "chop down his apple tree." Carter's Sergeant York-like story has him storming an Argonne trench full of Germans and forcing them to surrender; an unlikely tale, but he's got devilish Jonathan Pryce as his agent to make sure the first draft of history holds, so don't count him out.
If the raison d'être of Leatherheads was not to add something to the football movie canon but to have Clooney and Zellweger engage in a screwball banter-fest, then there's no excusing the paltry number of zinger missiles fired over the course of the film. There are only two memorable exchanges, one that occurs in a swanky hotel lounge with Clooney peering at Zellweger over the top of a magazine and another where he's sexily hanging out of the bunk of a train car like Marilyn Monroe while she fumes below. In each case it's Clooney who seems to be playing the coquette, while Zellweger often seems flatly annoyed instead of baited. They've both got the machine-gun-quick repartee thing down pat, though, and Clooney deserves some kind of praise for actually selling a line like "you're the kind of cocktail that comes on like sugar but gives you a kick in the head" but Netflix is full of better. And another episode in which they instantly "Clark Kent" themselves into the clothes of some knocked-out cops in order to make a getaway feels lifted from a different, skit-style tradition and isn't funny or original enough to balance out its awkwardness. Leatherheads isn't poorly made, but it's easy, hang-back material from a director who's already proven himself up for a challenge, and that's hard to accept.
READ MORE: Clooney, Krasinski and Zellweger Q&A
