A Real Kick

When is a sports movie not a sports movie? When the English produce it. So if you're looking for slow-mo shots of sweaty footballers or last second miracle shots on goal, look elsewhere. Want to see good filmmaking? Check out "The Damned United". How do the English do it?. Hardly a shot of anybody kicking the ball. Practically nothing on the pitch at all. No strategy, no explanation of the finer points of football. Maybe because the story is about more important things. Ambition. Envy. Loyalty. Like they say at Wembly, well played.
I am going to disagree with my critical hero (A.O. Scot-NY Times) and say that "The Damned United" is nearly Shakespearean in its scope and tenor. Our tragic hero is Soccer head coach, or in proper English, football manager, Brian Clough as played by Michael Sheen (The Queen, Frost/Nixon). Clough's ambition is driven by jealousy. The manager of the powerful Football club, Leeds United is Don Revie (Colm Meaney) a smart,tough and slightly unethical coach who snubs an impressionable Clough at an early match. The rest of Clough's career is spent looking for a measure of sweet revenge. Ambition. Jealousy. Revenge. They sound like tragic flaws to me. The Scottish King maybe?
The real strength of British filmmaking has got to be a never-ending pool of the best character actors in the business and "The Damned United" is no exception.
Colm Meaney as Revie and Jim Broadbent as a club owner are both magnificent, but Timothy Spall is the biggest news for me. I knew him as Ron's rat Scabbers in the Harry Potter series, but he's much more than an evil rodent here. He plays Sheen's loyal foil and the real brains of this footballing dynamic duo. Clough and Spall become the footballers version of an old married couple, both sick of each other and in desperate need of each other, so much so that both their wives disappear as characters by the end of the film. "The Damned United" is far away from that tired genre the "sports movie" (as executed in the classic American style), and it's much the better film-going experience because of it.