The Damned United

There was a time in the not too distant past when television's role as supreme mediator-of-all-reality went unchallenged. Its unprecedented reach and influence lent a magical potency to its creatures - TV was the stage upon which modern personality was created, nurtured, and destroyed. For British screenwriter Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon, The Queen, The Last King of Scotland) the industry's glamor-days are proving to be a goldmine of material from which his strikingly original studies in human frailty and ambition are developed: Frost/Nixon is a case in point, but TV plays a pivotal role in The Queen as well, as Helen Mirren's Queen Elizabeth is forced to reckon with a public which has assembled en masse behind the medium itself. Actor Michael Sheen fleshes out the nooks and crannies of the media-savvy personality in both films, playing the iconic TV personality David Frost in Frost/Nixon and Britain's first pop-celebrity PM Tony Blair in The Queen.

Morgan and Sheen's latest collaboration in The Damned United is another spin on this theme of televised celebrity. There isn't a British soul alive today who won't remember, if he/she was around in the seventies, the electrifying presence of Derby County FC manager Brian Clough on the Nine O'Clock News. Clough was without a doubt the most extraordinarily gifted manager and personality the League Division football world had ever seen, and his success at Derby County intersected neatly with his unusual ability to project a media image; it was that ability that led to the sort of fame only a TV audience could generate. The Damned United, which is adapted from the sensational 2006 novel by David Peace and directed by Emmy award-winner Tom Hooper, focuses on the period in which Clough took his languishing team from the bottom of the Second Division to the top of the First in just three seasons, which coup he then reversed with a disastrous spell as manager of rival team Leeds (the damned) United. If you are a football fan, the film will take you straight to heaven, but like Nick Hornby's hilarious Fever Pitch the experience is about much more than plain football. It is a nostalgically-inflected rumination on ambition, rivalry, obsession, partnership and betrayal; a sympathetic, humorous, and complex character study which is precisely tuned to its early-seventies' working-class British scene. The young, flamboyant Clough is perfectly balanced by his much more conventional but equally committed right-hand man Peter Taylor (played by Secrets and Lies star Timothy Spall) and it is their partnership which proves to be the solid foundation beneath his success, though his rivalry with arch-nemesis Leeds United manager Don Revie (played brilliantly by Colm Meaney) is the catalyst - without his determination to upstage Revie, Clough's meteoric trajectory is unimagineable. Not that Clough acknowledges outside influences. His outrageous self-confidence ("They say Rome wasn't built in a day, but I wasn't on that particular job") is blinding, but it is also the essence of the charm that held his public in thrall. When Revie goes on to become England manager Clough abandons Taylor and moves alone into the position at Leeds; it is as if he is driven by some insane daemon to follow Revie and overtake him on his own turf, but ambition of this nature seldom profits, as all great-theatre lovers know. Clough's dramatic failure at Leeds is as steep a descent as any star has ever known, and he is forced, in 44 short days, to make acquaintance with the dark side of his own ambition, to assess its costs on his personal and public life, to endure a public humiliation at the hands of a triumphant Revie, and to pick up the pieces as best he can. What he does with those pieces is a slice of soccer history, but the film includes the details in a satisfying postscript, along with real footage of Clough and Revie, a glimpse of what was for viewers of British television in the seventies two of its most fascinating duelling identities. Because it was as a television persona that Clough catapulted himself into the imagination of his public, just as the fascinated public's overwhelmingly positive response to his success fed his ever-expanding ego and fuelled his ascent. The Damned United captures that giddy whirl and nails it firmly into the center of the gritty, no-frills, working-man's world of northern England, with its whisky-soaked boardrooms, its overflowing ashtrays and beaten up soccer fields, its mud, sweat, and rain. Filmed in glorious location at authentic Saltergate and Elland Road grounds, produced with great attention to period detail, including curious facial-hairstyles, popular paintings from Woolworth's, clips of Jimmy Hill and snippets of the test-card, and gorgeously photographed as well, with a lot of contrasting green and blue interiors (fans will appreciate the symbolism), the film is a winner on every level; beautiful to watch, well-written, funny, dramatic, and true.