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If anyone is going to make a screwball comedy in the mold of those made in the 1930s and 40s, George Clooney is the man.
His classic good looks and charm give him a screen persona that has an almost timeless appeal, and he milks it every way he can in “Leatherheads,” a comedy set in the early days of professional football. Too bad no one else brings much to the table. Clooney, who’s moderately amusing and also directed the film, is a one-man team in this dull, lifeless movie that has the same level of quality as a pair of pleather pants.
The year is 1925, and football was a very different game. One referee, one football per game, no real rules and no helmets with facemasks — players wore leather headgear to protect their noggins, hence the title. With the professional league in danger of folding, veteran Dodge Connelly (Clooney) looks to the more popular game of college football for help, and finds it in Carter “The Bullet” Rutherford (John Krasinski, “The Office”). Carter is handsome, fast and a decorated war hero who attracts more than 40,000 people a week to his home games at Princeton.
After working out a deal with Carter’s conniving agent (Jonathan Pryce), Carter joins Dodge’s Duluth Bulldogs and the team goes on a winning streak in front of record-breaking crowds. Naturally, there’s a girl: Lexie Littleton (Renee Zellweger) is an ambitious reporter for the Chicago Daily Tribune, and her muckraking assignment is to befriend Carter so she can get the real story on his wartime heroism. Affections from both Carter and Dodge ensue, but they inexplicably don’t compete for her, meaning there’s no romantic intrigue in a movie that at its core is a romantic comedy.
There are, however, a few scenes with Lexie and Dodge that harken back to the great screwball comedies of Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, etc., including escaping from a speakeasy in police uniforms and some comical curtain pulling on a train. But Clooney and writers Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly always seem caught between making a full-fledged homage to the comedies of yesteryear and finding something, anything that will appeal to today’s audiences. Failing at one of these aspects is bad enough, but failing at both (as this does) makes it a real clunker.
Zellweger is also to blame, as she has no chemistry with either leading man. She appropriately plays Lexie as an asexual alpha-female, but her permanently-puckered lips and indifferent body language prevent her from displaying the real sass that someone in her position would have. Lexie is a woman in a man’s world, and yet you get the sense that she doesn’t believe she belongs there, she just inserts herself into the fold because her ego will not let her do otherwise.
The last time Clooney made a movie as an ode to a bygone era was “The Good German” in 2006, which was directed by Steven Soderbergh as a 1940s war movie. That movie wasn’t a success, and although “Leatherheads” is occasionally amusing it’s not a success either.
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