AFTER the twin triumphs “Michael Clayton” and “Good Night, and Good Luck” almost anything George Clooney does as an actor or filmmaker runs a risk of disappointing by comparison.
Especially when “Leatherheads,” the first film Clooney’s directed where he plays the lead, is in the notoriously difficult genre of romantic comedy – and he tries to revive the vintage screwball variety on top of that.
This doesn’t always work, but sometimes it’s quite funny, and $12 will buy you yards of the Clooney charm – plus some great sight gags and terrific period sets and costumes, gorgeously photographed by Newton Thomas Sigel and accompanied by a jazzy Randy Newman score.
The period is the Roaring ’20s, and the romance is played out against the early years of professional football, a
rowdy, ruleless sport that was far less popular than the collegiate variety.
Clooney plays Dodge Connelly, an aging World War I veteran who’s the captain of a rag-tag team in Duluth, Minn.
When the franchise’s sponsor pulls the plug, he comes up with the brilliant idea of poaching Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski), a hugely popular star at Princeton known as “The Bullet.”
Enter romantic complications in the form of Lexie Littleton (Renée Zellweger), who’s been dispatched by her editor in Chicago to discredit Carter’s supposed role as a World War I hero.
Lexie plans to use her feminine wiles on Carter, but her pass gets intercepted by Clooney’s Dodge – and they agreeably trade insults as Carter’s manager (Jonathan Pryce), who also covets Lexie, lurks in the background.
Clooney is trying for an homage to classics such as “His Girl Friday,” but he often fumbles the necessary breathless pace in a film that ideally would have been something like 20 minutes shorter.
The star-director and his credited screenwriters – Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly of Sports Illustrated – don’t seem to have ended up on the same page, though they’ve been developing it together for something like 10 years.
The lovingly detailed sports background – and hints of the big business that pro sports was eventually to become – is constantly threatening to overwhelm the romantic comedy, or at least put the brakes on it.
Occasionally, Clooney’s direction achieves the antic mayhem of the Coen brothers’ “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” while deploying the same self-deprecating slapstick in his performance – most notably in an extended brawl in a speak-easy, followed by a hasty escape.
It’s certainly easier to take than Clooney and the Coens’ joint attempt at screwball comedy, “Intolerable Cruelty.” That’s partly due to Zellweger, who can often seem mannered but here delivers an entirely credible variation on Rosalind Russell.
Krasinski (of TV’s “The Office”) is pretty much a cipher – too young for romantic scenes with Zellweger and too slight to beat up Clooney.
But Clooney backs him up with a well-chosen roster of character actors – most notably Peter Gerety, who takes charge of the flick’s weaker second half as the first NFL commissioner.
“Leatherheads” is far from a touchdown, but you gotta give points to any movie where a character describes its climactic game as a “muddy snoozefest.”