Review: The Damned United

Brilliance and self-destruction go hand in hand in Tom Hooper's The Damned United, a portrait of English football coach Brian Clough and his decades-long obsession with the rival club Leeds United. But despite flashes of game play (from back when soccer was a "beautiful game, that needed to be played beautifully") and a brief, impressive bit of juggle-and-shoot by former player and star Michael Sheen, this is anything but the action-packed sports film you might expect. Rather, it's an account of a man desperate for recognition who burned a lot of bridges and made a lot of mistakes on the road to glory, the story of a legendary football coach before he ever became a legend and the personal demons that almost completely ruined him.

In his opening scene Hooper obscures Clough's head from view, the point being that Clough and his driving ambitions were a mystery to most. Why did Clough, an outspoken critic of the dirty tactics of the Leeds United club, take a job running it after the departure of his biggest professional rival, the celebrated manager Don Revie? As screenwriter Peter Morgan argues, it was Clough's desperate need for Revie's respect that drove him, and it all stemmed from one fateful 1967 match between Revie's league-dominating Leeds United and Clough's own Derby County.

You see, on that day in 1967, after Clough had scrubbed the aging Derby stadium clean and dressed to impress, Revie – played deftly by Colm Meaney – neglected to greet him with a handshake. (Derby lost to Leeds 2-0 that day, to boot.) It was the ultimate insult for the upstart young manager, who'd grown up admiring and perhaps even idolizing Revie and finally thought himself on equal footing. Respect, it would seem, was something Clough desperately sought throughout his career, though he often settled instead for the incredulous attention of the public.

Hooper's film is based on a fictional novel by David Peace that itself is told, rather presumptively, from Clough's point of view. Like Peace's speculative memoir, The Damned United jumps back and forth from Clough's 1974 "present," in which he struggles with a Leeds United team that remains loyal to his predecessor, and the decade or so prior, during which Clough is increasingly hellbent on proving to the world, and to Revie, that he's an equal if not greater manager. The film makes a convincing argument that Clough's unhealthy fixation on beating Revie stemmed from some long-standing issues, not the least of which was the fact that his early career as a star striker was cut short by a devastating knee injury. Once Clough got a taste of greatness, he was forever haunted by the memory of it.

Like Clough himself and the world of British football, Sheen is a magnetic force around which the rest of the film revolves. Sure, it's by design – Hooper's camera allows Sheen to literally dominate the screen, subconsciously commanding the audience's attention – but you also find yourself giving in quite voluntarily to Sheen's natural, impish charisma. His ability to register incredible pain beneath charming nonchalance is mesmerizing, as when Clough, newly fired from Leeds United, is ambushed on live television by Revie's surprise appearance. Thanks to Sheen's innate charms, Clough is redeemable even at his meanest and most self-destructive; it's the only way to root for a protagonist who was so often, to put it bluntly, an embittered and selfish asshole.

But while The Damned United is successfully engrossing (and is filmed in the kind of dirty blue and brown hues and impeccable period detail that makes one yearn for the 1970s), it relies too heavily on its central "bromance" to explain away and fix Clough's obviously complex personal problems. Wavering between best friendship and bitter co-dependence, the relationship between Clough and his assistant manager Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall) is posited as the linchpin for Clough's greatest successes and greatest failures.

With Taylor at his side, Clough turns floundering teams into champs; when Taylor breaks off their partnership, Clough spirals into an abyss of bad decisions and public embarrassments. Strangely, the film only hints at Clough's well-documented battle with alcoholism. Instead, the life-altering power of bromance is what ultimately lifts Clough up from rock bottom, after which, we learn in an epilogue, he and Taylor reunited professionally and turned the 13th place Nottingham Forest club into a championship team. Clough then went on to earn his reputation as one of the best managers ever to coach English football.

Ultimately, this peek into the psyche of Brian Clough is more than just a character study of a man desperate to regain his lost glory; it's a textured look at what drives a person to excel, even at great personal cost. The rush of scoring a goal; the thrill of victory. Can't we all relate, even if few ever achieve the kind of accomplishments of all-star athletes/coaches/writers/politicians/celebrities for whom success so often balances precariously on the edge of ruin?