LEATHERHEADS
Rating: ** (out of ****)
Cast: George Clooney, Renee Zellweger, John Krasinski, Jonathan Pryce, Stephen Root, Wayne Duvall, Max Cassella
Writers: Duncan Brantley, Rick Reilly
Director: George Clooney
Now playing in wide release.

Oh, how the 1920s always look so beautiful in Hollywood period pieces. The films are always lighted with rich amber hues and scored to the music of Al Jolson. Everyone wears fedoras and tailored suits; the speakeasies have great jazz singers and fistfights that don’t look too painful; and the cars are shiny and the streets are always clean. The 1920s are the setting of George Clooney’s third directorial effort, Leatherheads. The movie is long and only fitfully amusing, but boy…it sure looks great.

Clooney is Jimmy “Dodge” Connelly, the captain of the not-very-talented Bulldogs football team. The team is on the verge of collapse when Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski), a decorated war hero, emerges as the most popular figure in college football. Dodge convinces his superiors to recruit Carter, who brings in thousands of fans to the bleachers. But there’s trouble afoot beyond the gridiron: an ambitious sports reporter (Renee Zellwegger) has heard that Carter may not be the war hero he’s cracked up to be. Of course, a love triangle ensues.

Clooney, who has appeared in several of the Coen brothers’ comedies, seems to be channeling the Coens’ comic sensibility. He fills Leatherheads will a lot of broad, cartoonlike characters and self-conscious references to past films, particularly the work of Spencer Tracey, Katherine Hepburn, and the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 40s. The humour shifts between aggressively quirky visual gags (one of the football team members is a 300-pound highschooler, ho ho) and aggressively witty dialogue, as when Clooney and Zellweger have scenes of rapid-fire comic banter. Clooney is an enjoyable actor and has decent comic timing, but Renee Zellweger is miscast. Her role calls for a ballsy, Rosalind Russell type, and Zellweger, whose screen persona is usually much more low key, isn’t up to the task. John Krasinski, from The Office, is pure vanilla in a very vanilla role.

Leatherheads runs an ungainly 114 minutes, at least 20 minutes longer than the average screwball comedy. The climactic football scene feels drawn-out, particularly since it comes after the logical climactic scene. When a story has so little substance, is it too much to ask that it wrap up after 90 minutes?

Leatherheads wants to bring back memories of the screwball comedies from the 1930s, but where those films felt spontaneous, this film is posturing. It’s as if Clooney wanted to emulate the older films but also show that he’s too cool for them by constantly winking at the camera and having his cast overact. The insincerity of Leatherheads becomes quite alienating. Light entertainment has rarely felt this exhausting. Yet it’s hard to hate Leatherheads. There is something about Clooney’s screen presence that’s kind of seductive, even in a performance that doesn’t quite work. There’s also something seductive about the film’s hyper-fetishized depiction of the 1920s. Even the mud on the football field looks beautiful. A lot of skilled technicians have done a very good job creating this cinematic wax museum.