The Damned United (2009)

Tom Hooper's The Damned United concerns Brian Clough's forty-four-day tenure at Leeds United in 1974, and the long, sour friendship with Peter Taylor that preceded and outlasted it. Michael Sheen does the uncanny-impersonation thing he does, all jutted jaw and wounded vanity. The film is adapted from David Peace's novel, itself a fever dream of the period, and the production has taken the wise precaution of being about football instead of about anything else. Reviewing it for contemporary markers is like inspecting a coal cellar for solar panels. The coal is very good coal.

The cast is white, male, and Northern, which is less a casting decision than a description of English football in 1974. The film has no interest in the bodies on screen, the politics of the boardroom, or the inner weather of anyone who is not Brian Clough. His drinking is treated as a flaw of character, never as a condition to be named and accommodated. Where the modern sports picture might locate a lesson, this one locates only grievance. The fights with Sam Longson and the Leeds board are personal and petty, driven by ego, and at no point does anyone suggest the arrangement of capital is the problem. It is a film about a man who wanted to be loved by the right people and was not.

The historical record, meanwhile, has been rearranged with some enthusiasm. Dave Mackay sued and received an apology and damages. Johnny Giles had already sued the book. A journalist who knew Clough personally catalogued seventeen inaccuracies. None of this amounts to revisionism in the contemporary sense, because the errors serve drama and not doctrine, and the film's final verdict arrives in an epilogue: Revie failed abroad, Clough and Taylor won two European Cups. There is no sermon here, no invitation to examine our own complicity in anything. It is a sports picture with a bruised ego at its center, and it goes about its business. The cellar remains a cellar.