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Driven by Elizabeth Olsen’s mesmerising lead performance, this languid and unsettling story buries deep into your mind

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The Damned United (Film)

by Julian Shaw | October 13, 2009 10:02 | Edited December 01, 2009 18:42

The Queen’s writer and star reunite in this majestic football drama.

Another majestic docudrama from The Queen scribe Peter Morgan, the doomed narrative of The Damned United examines how brash, silver-tongued football manager Brian Clough (Frost/Nixon star Michael Sheen) took over the reins of champion club Leeds United in 1974, only to run them into the ground. Through a series of momentum-building flashbacks, we learn that Clough - who earned fame by re-building second division whipping boys Derby County - was driven primarily by a self-destructive need to usurp his professional rival, Don Revie (Colm Meaney). Clough's 44-day tenure with Leeds has gone down as one of the most spectacular failures in the history of the sport, and Morgan's screenplay illustrates pointedly how errors of the human heart can wreck the strongest of men.

 

Clough's paranoid inner monologue defined the tone of author David Peace's source novel The Damned Utd, but Sheen single-handedly transports the essential grist of a dysphoric interior world into the film's third-person framework. Sheen gets the tics and syrupy accent of his character down to perfection, but more impressive - even Oscar-worthy - is the self-doubt and brittleness that he illumines beneath Clough's imperious facades.

 

The Damned United eventually emerges as a tender "bromance" between Clough and his right-hand man, Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall). The two swoon together in victory, embrace each other in defeat, and even shoe-shuffle together to the strains of "Love And Marriage" at one point. It's as affectionate, complex and co-dependent a relationship as any marriage, and it is their separation that sees Clough exiting the Leeds fold with an egg-covered face. Football is kept to an admirable minimum here; it's all about the characters whose operatic emotions are as compelling as a World Cup Final penalty shoot-out. That should mean the audience for The Damned United is virtually unlimited - so a note to distributors and cinema owners: get this into all major Australian cities immediately.