Word: clough
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...1970s, Brian Clough was one of the best-known figures in Britain. A talented soccer player whose career was cut short by injury, he went into management, leading not one but two unfashionable clubs to the English championship and then winning the European Cup two years in a row. He was a clever, cocky, working-class hero with an opinion on everything from Margaret Thatcher (against) to striking miners (for). Brilliant, needy, self-destructive - he was an alcoholic and had a liver transplant before he died in 2004 - he combined humor, bombast, friendships and rivalries in a long and very...
...Hooper's new film, The Damned United, British actor Michael Sheen takes on Clough. Like the two roles he's best known for - Tony Blair in The Queen and David Frost in Frost/Nixon - the part was written for Sheen by British playwright Peter Morgan, their sixth collaboration. Unlike Blair, Clough is barely known outside Britain, and The Damned United is unlikely to get a wide release. That's a shame; great though Sheen's Blair and Frost were, his Clough is of an even higher order, combining psychological insight with dead-on accuracy. (See TIME's photo-esay "Soccer...
...Damned United is based on an extraordinary 2006 book by British novelist David Peace, an account from inside Clough's head of the 44 days in 1974 when he managed Leeds United, a bunch of talented thugs who were then the best club in England, while embroiled in a fierce rivalry with their former manager Don Revie (Colm Meaney) and smarting from a bitter quarrel with his best friend Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall). Sheen, 40, has just the pedigree for the part. In his youth, he was a talented-enough soccer player to be offered a trial by the London...
...film is worth seeking out, and not just because of Sheen's extraordinary performance. In his research, Sheen discovered that Clough loved Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the 1960 Karel Reisz film, starring Albert Finney, about a young working-class iconoclast and self-mythologizer - just like Clough. The Damned United is an homage to films of the British new wave - Saturday Night, A Kind of Loving - in the way that it exposes how Britain's old class divisions stunted countless lives. Clough and Revie were intelligent men for whom soccer promised a release from a life down...
...ensuing preoccupation with Revie explains many of Clough’s actions throughout the rest of the film. Like Paul Ashworth in “Fever Pitch” (1997; not the Jimmy Fallon movie about the Red Sox), Clough is consumed by soccer to the detriment of his mental and physical health and the well-being of those around him. But the true emotional and thematic centerpiece of “The Damned United” is the relationship between Clough and his assistant manager, Peter Taylor (brilliantly played by Timothy Spall, best known for his role as Peter...