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Thursday 4 December 2008

Oh, George, how could you?

Leatherheads
PG, Nationwide

OK, the film has a good look, with its old-fashioned steam trains and cigarette advertisements and vintage sports kits and phones that dangle from hooks, all in neat, sepia-tinged colour. But there has to be more than a look and there isn’t. It’s meant to be an homage to the vintage Hollywood screwball comedies but, while Frank Capra and Preston Sturges and the rest made it look easy, Clooney does not. Clooney makes it look like extraordinarily hard work, probably because — and here’s the irony — its elements are just so lazy. The script is lazy, the music (ragtime) is lazy and the story is lazy beyond belief. How does Lexie find out the truth about Rutherford’s war? Through journalistic savvy coupled with hard-core investigative techniques? Nope. One night, she simply asks him:

Lexie: ‘Tell me what really happened to you during the war.’

Rutherford: ‘OK, then.’

Or words to that effect. Still, hardly hard-boiled witty repartee.

The performances? Crummy all round. Very, very crummy. I have nothing against Ms Zellweger, who was wondrous as Bridget Jones, but here she mainly just pouts and looks all squinty-eyed under a period hat. I don’t know what she is playing at, but it’s not sassy or spunky. She can’t even act smoking, holding out her cigarette disdainfully, as if it were a dirty nappy, whereas, as every smoker knows, you love that cigarette more than anything. (Listen, I talk a lot about things of which I know nothing, but I do know about smoking.)

And Clooney? Oh, George, how could you? While it is always a pleasure to look upon Mr Clooney, even I could tell he was lingering in frames and mugging when he should have been taking care of business behind the camera. That thing he does with his eyebrow; adorable, isn’t it? But in the scene where he slow dances with Lexie in a speakeasy, the scene which is meant to show their growing attraction, he does it so many times over her shoulder that I felt a bit ill. George and Renée are not Gable and Lombard all over again, just as this is less a rom com and more a deeply unsatisfying fumble. I’d still insist on giving George mouth-to-mouth, though. Once a good person always a good person, I suppose.

More articles from: Deborah Ross | this section

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