Leatherheads

by KYW's Bill Wine

There's no screwball in football, but there's plenty of football in this screwball comedy.

George Clooney's Leatherheads is, appropriately enough, a real kick -- a return to the jaunty, wisecracking romps of the '30s and '40s.

Clooney is the equivalent of the football triple threat, such as a player who can run, pass, and kick. As Hollywood's version, he's a multi-hyphenate, someone who gets his kicks acting, writing, producing, and/or directing.

This is Clooney's directorial followup to 2005's Good Night, and Good Luck. Oh, it won't be the same kind of Academy Award player. Hey, Good Night, and Good Luck received six (count 'em: six!) Oscar nominations, including one for best picture, and writing and directing nods for Clooney.

But Leatherheads, fueled by Clooney's fondness for the screwball genre, is both warmly nostalgic and richly entertaining. It's a retro tribute to football in 1925, when the college game packed fans in while the professional game -- with its nonexistent rulebook and freewheeling style -- remained an under-attended afterthought. (How times have changed!)

Producer and director Clooney stars as Dodge Connolly, the aging star player and captain of the Duluth Bulldogs, a pro football team that loses its sponsor as part of a league that hasn't really caught on with the public and appears to face certain collapse.

So he recruits World War I hero and Princeton football sensation Carter Rutherford, played by John Krasinski (of TV's "The Office"), to help clean up the team's image.

Renee Zellweger plays Lettie Littleton, a Chicago Tribune reporter after a story about Rutherford's war heroics, about which she's skeptical.

An inevitable romantic triangle develops among the three of them.

With the exuberance and irreverence of Slap Shot and the romantic fizziness of The Philadelphia Story, Leatherheads is a lovingly crafted entertainment, an homage of sorts with bounce and zip and style. It was scripted by former Sports Illustrated writers Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly, offers plenty of period detail and rapid-fire repartee, and features an invaluable contribution from composer Randy Newman, whose score is a delight.

Zellweger and Krasinski are certainly watchable talents, but director Clooney knows that his team's chief asset is his own leading man: that is, the magnetic superstar screen presence and comic timing of Clooney himself. And like a tailback showing off his great speed, he uses it.

The fourth quarter of the film doesn't live up to the standards set in the first quarter because Clooney attempts to force the issue and fashion a muddy but otherwise generic sports-thriller climax that never quite delivers. But not before executing a host of impressive plays and getting a number of big laughs.

So we'll hike 3 stars out of 4 for Leatherheads, a breezy and charming throwback to the screwball diversions of an earlier era. If it's not a touchdown, it's at least a comedy field goal, one that splits the uprights with room to spare.

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