Leather Heads in the Right Direction

Before I bought my ticket, I promised myself that I'd look into football culture in the 1920s and the beginnings of the NFL in order to have something more interesting to say about George Clooney's latest than my sparse knowledge of sports history would have otherwise provided. But I've found myself relieved of such researching duties because ultimately, Leatherheads (directed by and starring Clooney) veers from the end zone in order to tackle film history, rather than sports history. (Please excuse the horrific puns.)

Football is certainly prominent in the film, and moviegoers looking for a fun sports comedy will be mildly entertained—the plot does, after all, follow the fledgling and unruly start of pro football in 1925 as Dodge Connely (George Clooney) looks to enlist Princeton football star, war hero, and generally swell and marketable guy, Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski), to play for his team, the Duluth Bulldogs. Dodge hopes that Carter's star quality will bring some legitimacy to the financially failing pro league. It certainly does bring this, but it also attracts journalistic coverage that threatens to destroy the very person that it fosters: Carter. The chief and sole soldier of this onslaught is Lexie Littleton (Renée Zellwegger), an alpha-male female journalist assigned to investigate a tip that Carter's heroic war stories have been heinously augmented. The "girl" of course inspires a love triangle between herself and the two leatherheads—but more importantly, she motivates the film's subplot. Perhaps it could even be called the "co-plot," as it overshadows the football story on a number of occasions.

It doesn't spoil anything to reveal that the heroic epic of Carter's time in the trenches is the result of a goofy mistake, rather than valiant or intentional efforts (you can smell this play from a mile away). In fact, getting this issue out of the way allows you to get a taste of the film's central question: what's the merit in truth and orderly conduct when harmless lies and disorganization are so much more inspiring and entertaining?

This is where the commentary on film history enters. For the most part, Leatherheads forgoes evoking the 1920s America that we actually experienced, and it instead embraces a general nostalgia for the simpler and classier times that we know through classical Hollywood movies. In this vein, the film becomes almost ahistorical—although its football plot roots itself in 1925, its filmic plot jumps all over the place, ranging from the '20s, with its Chaplin- and Keaton-esque chase scenes, to the '40s, with chemistry between Clooney and Zellwegger that hearkens back to Grant and Russell. Dates become unimportant as the film finds itself in that timeless and lawless world of classical cinema, a universe in which two football players can get into a bare-knuckle boxing match on the train tracks, then share a bottle of whiskey afterwards without a scratch on their faces.

The movie is already being criticized for evoking nostalgia for a "fake" 1920s, but I can't help but feel that critics who claim this are really just misspelling the word "filmic." It's 2008—we've come to a time where the people that were old enough to experience 1925 in reality have passed. What we have in place of their real memories are their "fake" films. In such a situation, who's to say that grandiose and comedic bar fights, a la the Three Stooges, aren't "believable"?

But brushing aside my theoretical musings, it's important to note that Leatherheads accomplishes the primary task of those movies to which it hearkens back. Above all else, it aims to entertain, and in terms of that goal, it scores.