As a director, Clooney has made only three movies, all of them good and none of them alike: a dark satirical political comedy set in the 1970s, "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind"; a dark political drama set in the 1950s, "Good Night, and Good Luck," and now a screwball/ football romantic comedy of the 1920s, "Leatherheads."
The story, set in 1925, is ripped from today's headlines -- the tale of how money and rules killed professional sports back in the days when there was no such thing. No professional football, anyway. Jimmy "Dodge" Connolly (Clooney), a not-quite-grizzled vet in a younger man's game, does things the old-fashioned way: down and dirty and for the fun of it. He not only plays for the Duluth Bulldogs, he writes the newspaper stories that lionize them, which he dictates to his perpetually soused press pal Suds (Stephen Root) of the Duluth Democrat.
When the Bulldogs go broke (this was back before taxpayers generously subsidized what is theoretically a multibillion-dollar private industry), Dodge cooks up a scheme to recruit Princeton football phenom and bona-fide war hero, Carter "The Bullet" Rutherford (John Krasinski from the sitcom "The Office," in the Joel McCrea-Gary Cooper-Henry Fonda-Eddie Bracken role). With Bullet as their marquee name, the reunited Bulldogs sell every seat in the house.
Meanwhile, wily girl reporter Lexie Littleton (Renee Zellweger, in the Barbara Stanwyck-Rosalind Russell-Jean Arthur-Claudette Colbert role), employed by a certain Chicago daily broadsheet, conspires with her editor to cook the goose of the Bulldogs' Boy Wonder.
It seems the patriotic war-story legends surrounding him may have been somewhat exaggerated, and her job is to pump them up, then knock him down. But journalism is never that simple. Lexie takes a fancy to both the youngster and the oldster, and the question becomes who's gonna wind up as the Ralph Bellamy, Dodge or Bullet?
What we have here, as you can plainly see, is an amalgam of vintage screwball comedies ("His Girl Friday," "Meet John Doe," "Hail the Conquering Hero," "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town," "The Lady Eve"), spiked with a little pigskin slapstick (Harold Lloyd's "The Freshman," Buster Keaton's "College," the Marx Brothers' "Horsefeathers").
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