Spousal compromise led to going to Damned United over Where the Wild Things Are.

It was great!  I grew up in England so kids reading the Wizard comic, Michael Parkinson on the telly, people eating fish and chips actually out of a newspaper etc. takes me wistfully back to Dear Old Blighty.  My wife doesn’t get the cultural references and finds the idea of using newspaper as a wrapper really revolting.  The movie is about Bryan Clough, the brilliant, ambitious and vain soccer manager and she has never heard of him.

Despite all this, she loved the movie too.  So, I think it can fly in America.  It’s totally un-Hollywood.  The people are ugly, the weather sucks in many scenes (it is England after all!) and it’s about Clough’s short and terrible spell as manager of Leeds United.  Pretty original movie idea (most sports movies involve a struggle leading to improbable victory) and could have failed miserably.  But it succeeds on many levels.

The two main protagonists are Clough and his partner Peter Taylor and their relationship is rich and complex.  The competitiveness between Clough and the manager of Leeds United is deep but childish.  And underlying it all it, of course, there is the class system creaking along with upper class members of the football association doling out fines and suspensions to vicious working class players.  England has a North-South divide with the once wealthy North now subservient to the prosperous South.  And Clough is a Northener and you see the world through his eyes.  None of this is as obvious as I make it here and that’s the charm of it.

All of this hangs on a story of Clough’s rise and fall which is exciting even if you know nothing about soccer.  The director does a wonderful job.  There is a scene where Clough cannot bear to watch the game and waits in his office.  He follows the score via the shouts he hears through the frosted glass windows of his office.  As the fans jump and cheer, their shadows darken the office and we see are as exhilarated as Clough. The acting is superb too. Now I’ve oversold the whole thing and you will hate it.  Talk yourself down and go see it.