
THE DAMNED UNTIED
We call
it soccer, but for the Brits it’s football, and it’s damn serious business. From
1968 to 1974, Brian Clough (Michael Sheen) a manager/coach from the tiny town
of Derby, and his
assistant manager, Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall), turned a third-rate club into
division champs. That success wasn’t nearly as sweet as getting to take over
Leeds United, a top-tier team previously managed by Clough’s archenemy, Don
Revie (Colm Meaney). In this terrific film, screenwriter Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon) and television director Tom Hooper (John Adams), making his feature debut,
use a series of elegantly staged flashbacks to trace Clough’s and Taylor’s rapid
rise to fame, and the hubris that led Clough to stumble badly when he got to
Leeds, while also wounding his lifelong friendship with Taylor. A movie about
soccer that doesn’t spend a lot of time on the field, The Damned United, like everything Morgan writes, is an intimate character
study, one that’s enriched by a stellar ensemble of British pros, including Jim
Broadbent as Derby’s
team owner. These actors are good at what they do—like those players who dodge
and weave with effortless grace. (Chuck Wilson)