George Clooney

by Mark Browning

  For Clooney’s second directing experience, he gathered around him personnel with whom he had worked before, most particularly Thomas Sigel as cinematographer, Grant Heslov as producer (as well as playing minor part, Saul Keller), and Stephen Mirrione as editor. Clooney plays Jimmy “Dodge” Connelly, based very loosely on the career of Johnny “Blood” McNally of the Green Bay Packers, and the situation of Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski) is reminiscent of George Halas, coach of the Chicago Bears and his signing of halfback Harold “Red” Grange from the University of Illinois. Critical reaction to Leatherheads is typically lukewarm, which in retrospect is a little unfair. If there are weaknesses in the film, they lie in its underlying structure rather than its execution.

  Like the preceding films in this chapter, Leatherheads is related to screwball comedy, particularly the way it displaces explicit portrayal of sexual matters into highly charged dialogue, as seen in the verbal sparring between Lexie Littleton (Renée Zellweger) and Dodge, in their first meeting in the hotel foyer and later in the train cabin, mistakenly taken by them both. The film provides the opportunity for Clooney to indulge in his passions for motorbikes and sports and plays to his strengths in terms of comic timing and romantic entanglements requiring charm from the hero. His age, perhaps a growing impediment to gaining leading roles, becomes an asset in screwball, where the quintessential screwball actors, like Clarke Gable, were at least a decade older than the average leading man today.

  There are some similarities with A League of Their Own (Penny Marshall, 1992) in the portrayal of a fledgling professional sport in the early part of the twentieth century. There is a social element as we see the itinerant and fragile nature of the team, which travels to games only for them to be canceled when teams go into liquidation. Teams are rapidly built and dissolved, which is particularly hard on individuals who, according to Dodge, “are not exactly the cream of America’s workforce.” A montage of working locations (a factory, a mine, and a field) stands for the lives that the team have escaped from and to which they must return if Dodge cannot conjure up a deal to make professional football turn a profit.

  Part of the empathy that we might feel for Dodge is that with hindsight we know that he is right, whatever the wisdom prevailing at the time. C. C. Frazier (Jonathan Pryce, based on the real C. C. Pyle), symptomatic of the evolution of a new species, the sports agent, is seen as exploitative (taking a 25% cut from Dodge), unprincipled (threatening the Chicago Tribune with legal action, using a false witness), and opportunistic (he leaves the narrative, declaring “There’s always baseball,” before being seen framed among the corrupt New York Yankees team in the closing snapshots). A deleted scene would have shown C.C., like brutal boss Bob Brown in A Perfect Storm (Wolfgang Peterson, 2000), shrewdly but callously dividing up the take, leaving the individual players with very little to show for their work (see chapter 3). Corporate sponsorship is also waking up to the commercial opportunities in sport with Carter’s face even appearing on the huge clock, next to the sports field.

  In terms of staging sporting action, Clooney’s camera often gives us a tight shot on the ball carrier, increasing the sense of speed and avoiding the need to choreograph complicated plays (as well as suggesting the chaos of the opening game in a field). Individual plays and final scores are important but there is little sense of a play-by-play drama. Commentators are present but we hear their words only in the final game with Chicago. Shots of Carter tend to be reverse tracking shots as he runs at the camera and then forward tracking shots like a defender who cannot catch him (similar patterns are used in Forrest Gump, Robert Zemeckis, 1994). Shots of Clooney in particular tend to be tight so as not to emphasize his relatively diminutive size. The idea that his character could earn a living in his mid-40s in a fairly brutal sport, without obvious size or speed, is something the film does not dwell on, but the fact that Clooney had to cast extras who would not dwarf him, and order extras not to hit the director during plays, does tend to suggest a slight awkwardness here.

  A Changing World

  There is a strong parallel here between the increasing regulation of football with restrictions on those aspects of life that represent fun (players smoking while warning up or Dodge drinking and fighting until dawn the day of a big game, for example). Alcohol is ubiquitous, from Dodge taking a swig from a hip flask at the end of the game to Lexie getting drunk alone at the bar in a speakeasy to the whole notion of Prohibition (the ineffectiveness of which is stressed as Dodge greets the mayor). Dodge on his classic bike (a 1918 Indian replica custom-built for Clooney by specialist Eddie Paul), with goggles but no helmet, personifying the pleasure of biking, feels like a 1920s version of Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) and also anticipates similar shots of friend Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (David Fincher, 2009). This is not allowed to be too inflated, however, as the following shot shows Dodge pumping up a flat tire as a car passes him. The exterior shots have a crisp autumnal brightness, creating a fondly nostalgic view of an era on the verge of professionalism and the loss of something in the process.

  Along with provision of better equipment, Carter summarizes the ethos of the new era, “All that matters is that we win,” reflected in the booing of the big crowd at the climactic game.

  The final game is played cleanly but is described as a “muddy snoozefest” by the commentator. The challenge here is to make a game that is described as “boring” not seem so for viewers of the film, a challenge it does not entirely meet. The two teams, indistinguishable in the mud, are not playing for a title, a trophy, or money, and there is no sense that the heroes are really pitted against one another (although this is part of the hype around the game). There is little sense of a spectacle here (possibly bearing out C.C.’s earlier skepticism), and Dodge’s gag of swapping sides is funny in its absurdity but it is fairly unbelievable that no one in the crowd, aside from Lexie, would notice.

  The ragtime-style piano of Randy Newman (who appears briefly himself as the pianist in the bar fight) sets the mood and tone, but there is perhaps a greater focus on evoking a bygone era (two-piece phones, the Ladies Home Journal, custom-made motorbikes, advertising boards) than the dramatic structure of the narrative. The scene where the Bulldogs are sent off on tour allows shots of old cars to race alongside a steam train (which we see later several times passing through the frame obliquely) despite the fact that the situation scarcely merits such grand gestures. A tracking shot (possibly from a truck or another bike) shows us Dodge riding around looking for his team, motivating views of the car lot and stadium at Ennis Park. The sequence of Lexie and Carter in the waiting room frames them nicely against a window so we can admire the train in the background, but it seems designed to draw attention to art and production design, rather than convey anything about the characters. Similarly, it seems odd that Carter and Dodge are shown walking past the back of the hotel and onto a piece of conveniently well-lit railway line to settle their dispute in a fistfight. Exactly what they are fighting over is also unclear: Carter insults Lexie but he is the one who challenges Dodge.

  The visual style of the film reflects the times in which it is set, 1925, just prior to talkies, with a blend of conventional shot/reverse-shot exchanges and other features more evocative of the silent era and films like Brown of Harvard (Jack Conway, 1926) and Harold Lloyd playing football in The Freshman (Fred C. Newmeyer, 1925). The long shots of the stadium, the men running, a hero raised aloft as a hero, huge crowds, and the sepia tinting feel oddly reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) in matters of scale and chronology, even if not its aspect as a political parable. Clooney’s acting in the football scenes is exaggerated in the style of silent-era performance, cartoonishly girding his loins before running at a defender, and a cut as he runs straight into the camera before we cut to the defender, who picks him up with his legs still flailing. He is framed in close-up, pinned in a headlock as other players dive on top. In a later game, he is seen tackled from behind, signaled by a melod
ramatic throwing up of his arms as he runs at the camera. The new giant player they sign from high school predictably responds to being told to hit anyone who comes near the ball carrier by punching two opposition players and then the referee. In context, such acting style is appropriate and sometimes effective. The problem comes in dialogue-based scenes, where such exaggeration seems melodramatic to contemporary audiences.

  The chase through the back of the speakeasy draws explicitly on silent-era traditions as we have the slapstick of slamming a door in the face of chasing Keystone cop-style policemen and then a change of identity by the jump cut to the theft of their uniform. The bird’s-eye-view down the stairwell juxtaposed with a piano-led score leads into the visual gag of appearing at an open window just above a man contemplating suicide. We have the low-angle point of view of the crowd below, looking up as Dodge persuades Lexie to jump, and creates a diversion with a “Hey look, there’s two more” as their pursuers reach the open window. The later shot of them peeking out from behind an on-street display makes them look as if they are actually inside a shop window, and the following kiss, the only one we see in the whole film, is framed almost in silhouette, back-lit by this same display.

  Screwball

  Clooney opts to set his narrative in the past but the audience is still viewing it in the present and are not necessarily trained in reading a genre, which is rarely attempted, deceptively complex, and requires wit and intelligence in both writing and performance. The first meeting of Lexie and Dodge is highly choreographed. He first spies her in a raised seating area some distance away but is immediately struck by her appearance, possibly by the vibrant red dress she is wearing. The emphasis is very much on his reaction to her, who as far as we can tell remains oblivious to him at this stage, as we zoom in to his rapt face, giving a slight tilt of the head, a bit like some kind of strange courtship dance between birds. We shift between high angles of him and low angles of her as he moves around a pillar to get a clearer view and his curiosity is sufficient to motivate a closer shot. Dodge goes up the stairs, past the man (Leonard) who is being humiliated by Lexie, and sits across from her, picking up a magazine, which he then tries to hide behind. Lexie and Dodge appear to indulge in that staple of screwball, flirtatious banter but with a twenty-first-century slant as Dodge states that he is in love with Leonard and feigns injury at how cruelly she cast him aside. This breaks Lexie’s reserve and she laughs despite herself, admitting “You’re a lot of fun”; but even though both are sitting forward and have shaken hands and exchanged formal introductions and friendly smiles, he pushes her sense of propriety too far in asking her out. She chides him—“Just because we had a laugh, doesn’t mean you know me”—but although apologizing, he repeats his assertion that he does know her true nature.

  However, there is little evidence that this is actually true. Her excuse (that she is waiting for her boyfriend) is actually not true; she is waiting for an interview with Carter. He takes her for a tease (“the kind of cocktail that comes on like sugar but gives you a kick in the head”) but actually the only one she teases is him. She does not appear to flirt with Carter to get her story; instead she takes her time befriending him but makes no promises of anything in return. A deleted scene, in which Dodge disagrees with Carter that C.C. will not be able to seduce a stranger on the train, shows that his confidence in his knowledge of women is misplaced as he loses the bet. Although screwball conventions dictate that insults should be read as displaced compliments, her comment that being “the slickest operator in Duluth is kinda like being the world’s tallest midget” has some edge to it.

  The farcical situation comedy of Lexie and Dodge winding up in the same cabin is the kind of more intimate experience in which, as in typical screwball, potential lovers are thrown together by circumstances and is an excuse for further high-speed banter, largely picking up the conversation from the foyer, possibly signaling a thawing of the frostiness between them. This is an explicit allusion to Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) where hero and heroine (Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert) are separated only by a blanket over a rope. The thin borderline here is represented by the curtains on their individual sleeping berths, producing a version of a split-screen effect as both Lexie and Dodge can be framed within the same shot. Dodge is the more powerful position here, having established his territory, and can look down on her discomfort with some pleasure. Her “You wanna play dirty?” is batted away with “Maybe later. I’m a little tired right now.”

  In general, some of the banter feels like slightly warmed-over Oscar Wilde (Leonard’s “I didn’t come over here to be insulted” is answered by Lexie’s “Where do you usually go?”), and Dodge’s admission “Well, you got me on that one” (in relation to being too old for Lexie) is delivered out of the side of Clooney’s mouth, almost like a Groucho Marx impression.

  The banter is picked up in the speakeasy, where Zellweger’s persona is reminiscent of Bridget Jones. Her tipsy dismissal of his date, dubbed “Miss Nipplewidth,” initiates some witty exchanges about the girl’s age and IQ (reckoned to be 21 in both cases) and her suitability for Congress. His resorting to cliché (opining “You’re only as young as the woman you feel”) is undercut by her more sarcastic “How quiet it must be at the Algonquin with you here in Duluth.” What appears to make the difference here is his persistence, his winning smile, and the offer of their first physical contact through the socially acceptable means of dance. The song being played (Ledisi Young’s version of “The Man I Love”) suggests that Lexie has been thinking about him but we have little corroboration of this. She feels comfortable enough with him to tell him about Carter’s confession, but screwball contrives to disrupt intimacy, and the dissolve, showing them moving closer, is broken up by the police raid. Similarly, her answer to Dodge’s implied proposal is interrupted in an extremely contrived fashion by a phone call from Carter.

  The characterization of Lexie has several of the surface features of a screwball heroine but little of its depth. Shown first in close-up as elevator doors open, in a red hat with a prominent feather, she is positioned as stylish and unconventional; but on being called into her editor’s office, the sassiness that she shows, perching uninvited on the desk opposite an unknown guest (a senior officer in uniform), seems cheeky to the point of impertinence. That said, she is bored with predictable stories featuring handsome heroes, whether soldiers or football stars. As an intelligent journalist, she is operating in a predominantly male environment, but despite realizing that a marriage proposal from Dodge represents the admission that she “can’t make it in a big man’s world,” she appears to accept this.

  There is a slight reversal of conventional gender roles, in Dodge’s admission of feelings for her (“I’m nuts about you”) and her assertiveness in interrupting his speech by initiating a kiss. Her presence in the press box causes comment, but in the climactic game it is her tendency to swear that seems to provoke more reaction in a traditionally all-male preserve. At the end, she is the one who picks him up on a bike but the inversion seems only half-hearted. The position of pillion seems unnatural for him, as he flips off when the bike moves away, she needs his help to restart the bike, and we dissolve to a shot of Dodge steering.

  There is a certain level of sexual coyness (Carter walks Lexie to her cabin and later Dodge walks her back to the hotel) and we are told (twice) that Lexie has great legs (a fact she herself declares) but neither see them nor see their effects on anyone else. The appearance of Dodge with red lipstick prominently on his face is the kind of cross-dressing element impossible in black-and-white, but it is really just a comedic ploy, undercutting his protestations of innocence. However, again, matters of a more intimate nature are interrupted, again by physical comedy as Carter puts his arm too close to a nearby candle and his sleeve catches fire (visible as Carter raises his flaming arm into the frame).

  Despite Lexie’s protestations to the contrary, she is used as the bait in a honey trap to make Carter open up and te
ll the truth about the war. Carter declares to Dodge that he will confess everything, but Dodge advises him against this, noting “We like our heroes.” While a fair point about American society’s thirst for positive role models, this rather ignores what it means for Lexie, supposedly the love of Dodge’s life, as it condemns her to remain a discredited journalist. In a sense then, Dodge wins Lexie by default. The banter in their first meeting ends with Lexie assuring him “I’ll live” to which he adds “Alone.” The specter of spinsterhood for a 31-year-old unmarried woman may play a part in her decision by the end to allow Dodge to be a little more familiar.

  Overheard dialogue is a further part of screwball, but apart from the humor of Dodge walking out of shot and then popping back, his reaction to hearing Lexie’s plan is a little strange. He confesses while they are in the cabin that he knows what he she is up to but does not warn Carter, a fellow sportsman, apparently a reasonably decent fellow and hardly deserving of Lexie’s scheming. Dodge’s silence is a character action (or inaction) based on the functional needs of structure rather than arising credibly from a character’s motivation.

  Carter is likeable enough but remains more of a handsome, privileged type than an individual. Without more edge to his character (he recounts his war story with a sense of bemusement) or arrogance (perhaps justifiably so given his talent), it is hard to have any strong feelings as a viewer about him, which makes his rivalry with Dodge problematic. We are told from early on, rather than shown, that Carter’s reputation is built on a lie, undermining the possibility of a dramatic revelation. He confesses his wartime tale but Lexie rewards him only by betraying his trust and printing the story (although to have refused would have cost her job and also appear to cave in to pressure from the unscrupulous C.C.). Carter seems closer in age to Lexie, and as a future Harvard law graduate, socially and financially is clearly a much better prospect. When Dodge looks across at Carter and Lexie chatting easily at a nearby table as he negotiates with C.C. or looks back at the pair as they sit behind him on the train, there is interest on Dodge’s part but also an implicit recognition that this match seems entirely natural. A deleted scene in the dining car would have shown Carter describing his rather bloodless regime and all the things he cannot eat and declaring at the end that he is “no fun at all,” but we feel its loss in giving us more direction about his role in the film. He does not create the lie about his wartime record (even if he bears some responsibility for perpetuating it). He does not, as Dodge does, try to push his interest in Lexie beyond what she will accept, walking her to her cabin door like a perfect gentleman. The one thing Carter cannot do is knock insults back and forth. Another line deleted from the dining car scene is Lexie’s answer to Dodge’s question of what C.C. has that he does not. Slowly she lists “money, power, influence” but then after a pause continues, “taste, charisma … intellect,” prompting a spluttering Carter to admit, thumping the table, “You are a loaded pistol.” More cynically, Dodge observes that she is more “like a fox in a henhouse.”