The Damned United
Tom Hooper (2009)
These days, when filmmakers are casting a picture about a certain type of British male celebrity of the last half-century, the default choice for the part seems to be Michael Sheen. By a certain type of celebrity, I mean one who was (or is) ‘done’ by TV impressionists: Sheen appears to be getting these roles because of his skills as a mimic. Of course, to many people that’s a much more magical talent than acting. Sally and I both got the sense that there were a fair few people watching The Damned United who weren’t regular cinemagoers – who were there to see what, on the face of it, is a surprising rarity: a British film about football. (Leo Robson’s good piece in the TLS has some interesting suggestions as to why the rarity isn’t surprising.) The enthusiastic reaction throughout, with applause at the end, was pretty refreshing in the dead zone of the Richmond Odeon; people alongside and in front of us murmured admiration during the film that Brian Clough was ‘exactly like that’. Some of those who make their living from watching films evidently feel the same way. Talking on BBC News 24, Mark Kermode described Sheen’s performance as ‘spot on’ – before admitting that, until seeing a documentary about the real thing screened a few days before the release of The Damned United, he knew Clough mainly through Mike Yarwood’s impression of him. According to Wikipedia, Sheen will be playing Tony Blair for the third time in a film called The Special Relationship (directed as well as written by Peter Morgan), about Blair and Bill Clinton. Can’t Sheen do Clinton too? It seems only a matter of time before someone comes up with the idea of a film in which Michael Sheen plays all the parts – a big-screen equivalent of The Mike Yarwood Show.
This all means that what Sheen does as Brian Clough in the entertaining The Damned United may not be good news for his acting career – but there’s no denying it’s good news for us in the audience: he’s terrific. With the possible exception of his portrait of Kenneth Williams in the BBC film Fantabulosa, this is Sheen’s best screen acting so far – certainly his best work in the cinema. Kenneth Williams’s aggressive use of performance – and the chasmal discontinuity between his public and private behaviour – were central to his character in a way that gave an inherent substance to Sheen’s accomplished impersonation. Even so, he was very good at conveying Williams’ love-hate relationship with an audience (the love part being a passion for showing off to them). That kind of substance isn’t guaranteed in the same way if you’re playing Tony Blair or David Frost or Brian Clough. One reason Sheen is so good as Clough is that it wasn’t very long before I was responding to a characterisation rather than an impression. In contrast to his performance in the film of Frost/Nixon, he absorbs Clough’s facial and vocal mannerisms quickly and completely. Sheen really engages with the lines. He’s aware of their comic potential but he plays them on the whole pretty straight and is often much more funny as a result (as, for example, when Clough learns that Dave Mackay has accepted the Derby County board’s offer to replace him as manager and says incredulously. ‘That fat fuck? I signed him …’).
In his novel The Damned United, David Peace found a highly effective way of getting inside Brian Clough’s head and writing sporting history in tandem. Clough’s family thinks that the book traduces his character but Peace convinces you of the dynamic workings of Clough’s obsessive brain. One aspect of that is the constant, churning reiteration of football facts and fixtures: because they matter so much to Clough, they imprint themselves more strongly in your mind – the technique builds the character and, at the same time, increases the impact of the material that forms the football chronicle. Clough doesn’t believe in God or luck, only in Brian Howard Clough; but the relentless, anxious repetition of the same phrases – often the same curses – turns them into mantras that are a running contradiction of Clough’s disavowal of superstition (one of the traits he most hates in Don Revie – who’s alleged to have sacked one of the Elland Road cleaners because she turned up to work one day wearing green). Peter Morgan’s adaptation of the book is very shallow, except when he seems occasionally afflicted by guilt at how much more there is to Peace’s material than his script is getting across, and makes a desperate lunge for depth or, at least, awkward psychologising. Timothy Spall, as Peter Taylor, gets the worst deal in this respect – having to impart home truths to Clough even when Taylor’s in hospital recovering from a heart attack. There’s a repeat performance on a beach in Majorca when Clough has been offered the Leeds United job – this time a telling-it-how-it-really-is pas de deux between Clough and Taylor.
One consequence of Morgan’s simplification of Clough-according-to-Peace is that, in the film, the presentation of Clough’s animus against Don Revie is basically misshapen. In the book, Clough seems to have multiple bêtes noires – among whom Revie is a particularly salient example because his complexly negative approach to the beautiful game is deeply antipathetic to Clough’s own and because, even in his absence, he’s such an impregnable force in the Leeds United set-up that Clough inherits. The book comprises 44 chapters – each one representing a day of the short-lived Clough regime at Leeds and cross-cutting between the ‘present’ of August and September 1974 and Clough’s biography, from his playing career to the point at which he accepted the Leeds job in July 1974. The screenplay is structured, however, so that Clough and Taylor’s amazing success at Derby County seems little more than a preparation for Clough’s notorious failure at Elland Road. Morgan also traces Clough’s feelings about Revie back to a single, decisive incident in 1968, when Leeds visited the Baseball Ground for an FA Cup tie, Clough offered his hand to shake Revie’s, and Revie ignored him. This fails to do justice not only to the number of demons Clough is fighting but also to his philosophy of football. (Hadn’t Clough noticed before being snubbed that he didn’t like the way Revie’s Leeds United played?)
Peter Morgan’s bluntness as a satirist, already evident in The Queen, was confirmed in the screen version of Frost/Nixon. Stephen Frears’s direction turned The Queen into something better than the script deserved and Tom Hooper, whose first cinema feature this is (and who took over the project when Frears withdrew in late 2007), does Morgan a similar favour, although in a very different way. The decision to deglamorise English football of the period seems largely designed to contrast it with what it’s now become – and to suggest the impossibility of a Clough-Taylor partnership transforming the fortunes of a struggling club like Derby County in the money-driven oligarchy of twenty-first century English soccer. Some of the effects of this are odd at first: the action takes place, after all, in the years immediately following England’s World Cup win. The sport didn’t feel unglamorous at the time, even if it was still essentially a working man’s game in terms of who went to watch matches every week. You accept the dilapidated look of the buildings at the Baseball Ground but Hooper seems to be overdoing it in the way that he shoots the football itself. Even allowing for the notorious state of the pitch at Derby, these mud-splattered sequences make the 1960s English game look comically prehistoric – in the way that George Clooney presents 1920s pro American football in Leatherheads – and when Hooper chooses to insert film of actual matches of the time, his invented sequences stick out as fake in more than just their visual texture. Yet this cartoonish approach pays off eventually and makes a virtue of the crudeness of Morgan’s characterisation – of the Leeds United personnel in particular. The Leeds team suggests a collection of overgrown borstal boys – they look like the dirty players Clough believes Revie has encouraged them to be. This misses out on the extent to which, in the book, Clough sees goodies and baddies even within Elland Road but it’s comically effective, given that the Leeds players, whatever else you thought of them, were at the top of the professional tree – the crème de la crème in terms of medals won (even if these included more runners-up medals than they or Revie would have liked), international caps, etc. The fact that Billy Bremner – the epitome of the players’ hostility to Clough – is played by Stephen Graham, so convincing as a psychopath in This is England, injects a troublingly serious element into the cartoon, however. And I didn’t like the way that the players, if they weren’t presented as hooligans, were shown as meekly dim (the Derby County team doesn’t seem to have one brain to go round the first eleven).
The film develops the idea that Peter Taylor was the only friend Clough ever had in a way that’s striking but overdone. Hooper presents details of the two men’s relationship that would ring truer if you didn’t feel they were trying to say more than they showed – like the easy, unconscious intimacy of Taylor feeding Clough chips in the car as they’re driving to Dave Mackay’s house to persuade him to sign for Derby County. The director fails with the stupid climactic scene – an invention for the screenplay – in which Clough drives to Taylor’s home in Brighton and asks for forgiveness. There is, though, a good – for as long as it remains unspoken – sense that the relationship with Taylor, because it’s based in football, is a matter of life and death; and that Clough’s relationship with his wife and children is precious partly because there’s not so much at stake. The sanctuary of family life is a strong element in Peace’s book and Hooper gets it across well in an unstressed way. The director is right too not to resolve neatly the balance of power within the Clough-Taylor management team: we’re not made to think that Clough is a windbag and that it’s Taylor who was the genius; yet Taylor’s presence and support do seem to have been needed for Clough to realise his talents as an inspirational coach. (Clough went to Nottingham Forest in January 1975 but the club’s meteoric rise began when Taylor joined him in mid-1976.) It might have been better, however, for Taylor’s reasons for refusing to go to Leeds with Clough to have included not only loyalty to the Brighton chairman Mike Bamber but also an awareness that things wouldn’t work out for Clough and Taylor at Leeds, not just because ‘We hate them’ but because of the Revie inheritance.
The adaptation omits a lot of elements that are crucial – some of them are crucial even within the film’s own terms. Its prologue explains England’s elimination in the qualifying stages for the 1974 World Cup and Alf Ramsey’s sacking; there’s a suggestion that a new young manager is needed and a legend comes on the screen: ‘There can be only one man for the job … ‘ – with the strong implication that that man is Clough. Yet, when the time comes, we’re not shown Clough awaiting the call; when he reads in a newspaper, on the beach in Majorca, about Revie’s expected appointment to the England job, he seems (mildly) annoyed because it’s Revie rather than because it’s not him. The film doesn’t connect this at all with Clough’s longstanding resentment that, as a player, he didn’t get the chances in the England team that he deserved. Without knowing about Clough beforehand, an audience would find it hard to know from the film whether he was that much of a footballer himself (when he tells the Leeds players how many goals he scored, you might think that’s just typical of him shooting a line about how great he is). There’s next to nothing of his burgeoning career as a TV pundit, which caused so much friction in his relationships with the board at Derby County; and Clough’s alcohol consumption at this stage of his life is less than David Peace would have you believe (although Peace may have exaggerated). Morgan’s focusing on Revie as Clough’s nemesis means that the breakdown in his relationship with Sam Longson, the Derby County chairman, is hastily and clumsily written – although the set-tos between Sheen and Jim Broadbent as Longson are vigorously well played. (Broadbent has the ability to make a character like this both convincingly generic and strongly individual – whereas Henry Goodman, playing the Leeds boss Manny Cussins, is just a caricature football club chairman.) Derby’s defeat by Juventus in the first leg of the European Cup semi-final in 1973 is attributed to the dirty play of Leeds in a league match against them the preceding weekend – even though the match became notorious for accusations that Juventus had bribed the referee. But at least the film elides and softens themes in Peace’s novel so as to praise Brian Clough rather than condemn him. The Damned United eventually comes across as a tribute to the best manager(s) the England team never had.
One of the most powerful elements of Peace’s book is its obsessive momentum and one of the best scenes in the film is when Clough stays underground for the duration of one of Derby’s home matches against Leeds, listening to the crowd above and watching the clock. It’s a sequence that will resonate for all of us for whom the outcomes of sporting contests can be so important that we can’t bear to watch – although it also makes you think it’s something of a dereliction of duty on Clough’s part (as it is on your own part when you walk the streets while Cheltenham or Wimbledon or the Olympics are on television). I wanted more scenes like this – to see Morgan and Hooper dramatise, for example, the extraordinary circumstances in which Derby County won the First Division title in 1972. These moments are critical in the book, not only because they’re remarkable pieces of sporting history but because they provide the relatively few moments when Clough is triumphant – when the conviction that he’s the best eclipses, very temporarily, the furious fear that they’ll never let him win. In The Damned United David Peace chooses the period of Brian Clough’s career that is most easily susceptible to this psychoanalysis of him. The what-happened-next legends at the close of the film remind us of Clough and Taylor’s great partnership at Nottingham Forest in the late 1970s: promotion to the First Division in 1977; the championship the following season; successive European Cup wins in 1979 and 1980. Peace might have set himself a tougher challenge in describing how Clough dealt with more sustained professional success of this kind (although he gives us a clue: the fact that Mrs Thatcher came to power in the same week of 1979 obviously took the edge off the first European Cup for Clough).
There are good performances from Colm Meaney as Don Revie (utterly reasonable and just about as repellent) and the always convincing Maurice Roeves as Jimmy Gordon, Clough’s long-suffering assistant (who, unlike Taylor, followed him to Leeds). Where Hooper doesn’t use actual football commentaries, he’s engaged the services of Tony Gubba to record them. Gubba’s voice is unmistakable but has a curiously unconvincing effect here: because Gubba was usually on the reserve bench for the BBC as far as commentating on top fixtures was concerned, he doesn’t sound the right man for some of the matches he’s the voice for here. Nowadays, of course, he’s demonstrating that there’s life after Match of the Day as the voice of Dancing on Ice (as if to revive the old but-is-it-really a-sport? debate about figure skating): he’s beginning no longer to sound like a voice of football at all.
A significant difference between Michael Sheen’s Clough and the original is that the real Clough naturally put backs up in a way that Sheen doesn’t – just the sound of Clough’s voice, let alone what he said, was a physical irritant for many people, even those who thought the world of him. Sheen is infuriating in an essentially likeable way. What’s coming to seem an innate decency in Sheen may express his limitations as an actor – or at least a generosity towards the characters he’s interpreting that amounts to a limitation because he is in effect resisting showing their dislikeable qualities. (For as long as he’s playing parts written by Peter Morgan, however, Sheen’s sympathy will tend to be a pleasant corrective to the writer’s smug superiority to most of the characters that he writes.) It’s Michael Sheen who’s chiefly responsible for giving depth to The Damned United. The screenplay isn’t good enough to allow him to do more than imply more to Clough than meets the eye and ear – and perhaps I’m drawing on my recent reading of Peace’s book to give substance to Sheen’s portrait (you’d certainly be hard put, on the basis of the film alone, to say what’s going on inside Brian Clough’s head). But The Damned United is a triumph for Michael Sheen: whether casting directors fully realise it, he’s not just an ace impressionist – he’s a good actor too.
2 April 2009