The Damned United - Tom Hooper

Most sports movies feature a team of Bad Guys and a team of Good Guys. You know the Bad Guys are bad because they always win. They have glowering expressions. Wear dark colors. They leave poor victim teams bloody and ravaged on the field, and the soundtrack cues up music to indicate the arrival of the Sith Lords. You know the Good Guys are good because they have dialogue. They’re underdogs with hopes and dreams, unbreakable spirits, and a devoted coach who delivers a stirring speech at halftime to whip his boys into shape to come from behind and win it all.

What’s interesting about The Damned United is that it might have told that story, but doesn’t. As many fact-based films do, it ends with subtitles explaining where its characters ended up, and in this case we learn that Brian Clough would become a triumphant football manager (that’s soccer to us Yanks) and that his arch nemesis Don Revie would become mired in scandal and disgrace. This film might have ended with Clough’s team achieving the unprecedented feat of winning back-to-back European Cups. But that’s not what this film is about.

With a screenplay by Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon) and direction by Tom Hooper, adapting the novel by David Peace, The Damned United is more interested in a darker period of Clough’s career and considers not the triumph of a dedicated manager but the humbling of an oversized ego. It’s about unchecked ambition, resentment, and pride. Potently acid in tone, it features precious few good guys. Only the butting of heads and the bitter side of sports rivalry.

Michael Sheen plays Clough in an electrifying performance. The boyish handsomeness that has served him well as former British Prime Minister Tony Blair in no fewer than three films he now frays the edges of. His smile is a little crooked, cynical. His voice conveys casual arrogance. He is a fascinating study in hubris; you can’t take your eyes off him the closer and closer he flies to the sun.

The film opens in 1974, when Clough is appointed manager of Leeds United, a dominant team that was once his bitter rival. Six years prior, the United played its first match against Clough’s ragtag Derby County team. Clough was honored to host the football powerhouse; scenes show him overseeing the grooming of the field and undertaking the cleaning of the guest bathroom himself. But when they arrived, they and their manager, Don Revie (Colm Meaney), were casually dismissive. The United played dirty, and when Revie left he didn’t even shake Clough’s hand. The incident created in Clough an obsessive anger. Destroying Revie’s legacy became his life’s work.

Clough, predictably, has difficulty getting through to his new team. Whose fault is it? Mostly Clough’s, but partly the team’s as well. Clough had been mercilessly critical of their tactics, called them cheaters. Well, they could hardly object on grounds of inaccuracy. Under Revie’s leadership they intimidated referees, bullied their opponents. Team captain Billy Bremner (Stephen Graham) was known to dive extravagantly onto the field in the hopes that the other team would be penalized for imaginary roughness. The tactics worked — that’s why they used them.

Clough’s management strategy is prolonged vengeance. He expresses his bitterness openly, thinking he will at last be vindicated, but he’s the architect of his own downfall. What makes this clash compelling is how interested the film is in the personalities of the characters. Clough has become monstrous in his self-importance. His players are caught between feelings of disdain for their new manager and their love of the sport; they want to win, but they don’t want to win for him.

Is Don Revie the villain of the piece? Hard to say. We seem to learn a lot about him, but what we’re really learning is how Clough sees him. His real personality remains mostly a mystery, leaving us to question whether Clough sees with clear eyes or with hurt feelings and disillusionment. The Leeds United flourished. Revie surely had a hand in any unsportsmanlike conduct, whether by permitting it or promoting it. He wanted to win. The two men have that in common.

At first obscured by Clough’s force-of-nature presence, Derby County assistant manager Peter Taylor soon emerges as the emotional heart of the film. He’s played by Timothy Spall of the Harry Potter films, who subtly but indelibly conveys the anxiety of being caught in Clough’s steamroller and brings a welcome warmth to an otherwise dark character study. It there’s any hope at all for the vainglorious Clough, it’s in the fact that he’s earned the friendship of such a man, who has a perspective often overlooked in the victory-at-all-costs world of sports: that winning isn’t always the same thing as success.

Watch a trailer for the movie here: