The Damned United

So a second blog post and a second review of a film of an unfilmable novel: The Damned United. The Damned United started as David Peace's faction about Brain Clough's forty-four days as manager of Leeds United. Adapted to a screenplay by Peter Morgan of The Queen fame, directed by Tom Hooper and starring Michael Sheen as Brain Clough, Timothy Spall as Clough's assistant Peter Taylor and Colm Meaney as Don Revie.
Morgan has taken Peace's book and softened the edges, gone is Clough as an emerging alcoholic and in its place we get a charismatic, funny engaging Cloughie. The dark edges of Peace's Clough, with its stream of conciousness and almost magical style have been stripped out for a more linear story-telling style. And in doing so we get a much tighter more coherent narrative but we lose an important motivation for the character. In Peace's book the demons that drive and haunt Clough are dark and complex in Morgan's screenplay they are slight; a perceived insult from Revie to Clough is supposed to be enough for us to believe that this complex man could be driven to such depths of self-destruction that we see on screen. The one time Tom Hooper uses a Peace Like storytelling technique (a late night drunken call from Clough to Revie) seems out of place in this lighter, brighter simpler context.
Clough's self destructive streak here centres around the three way relationship between Revie, Taylor and Clough and for this film to work we have to believe in those three figures. And in the acting on display we get a master class in character creation. Michael Sheen is well know for his quasi-impersonations from Kenneth Williams to Tony Blair and never has he made a better job of it. The Cloughie voice and mannerisms are perfect but more important than an impersonation he gives us a man whose own hubris will bring him down like a Greek tragedy. Throughout this film he is never less than watchable and he never lets the 'impersonation' take over, there's no Mike Yarwood stylings on display here, a trap it could have been so easy to fall into. And he gets such support, the emotional heart and conscience of the film is Timothy Spall as Peter Taylor. Freed from the need to accurately impersonate a real person Spall gets to wonderfully fulfil the role of the man who knows that inevitably his love will destroy him. It's a marvellous performance never better than when he tries to lead Clough back from the brink only to have it al thrown in his face during a break on the Costa Del Sol. The third side of this triangle is Colm Meaney as Don Revie. Revie's reputation has suffered since the seventies (outside of Leeds) and Meaney could have chosen to play him as a mean spirited, nasty little man, but instead he finds a humanity. His frustrations with Clough perplex rather than drive him, we get a real human portrait of man often vilified by what happened to him after Leeds.
Using these wonderful performances Tom Hooper creates the footballing world at once recognizable as the seventies and yet never wallowing in a nostalgia. He coaxes these wonderful performances from his actors. Always allowing a space for them to fill, never boxing them in with stylistic touches but still finding his own expression. His use of open spaces in the frame gives us a cinematic dimension to what is often two people talking. Hooper's work has largely been in television and yet his work breaks out form that smaller space in a way that The Queen never did. Yet he makes television one of the motifs of the film, reusing highlights from real matches and using Clough's many appearances in the studio as a device to propel the story. Finally he achieves a real first in football films; he has put football on the silver screen without it looking stupid. One of many achievements in a charming film.