Leatherheads.

"Taking a break from his duties as class president of Hollywood to direct himself as an over-the-hill jock, George Clooney has gone for the third time in three films to a past American decade, this time the mid-1920s for an antic sports comedy set at the quaint, anarchistic dawn of professional football," writes Bill Weber in Slant. "Based on a script by two Sports Illustrated writers that's been long in preproduction, Leatherheads begins with a light, mocking tone and burnished autumnal look, and its period details are rich, classy, and comforting - but hardly ever funny."

"[F]or its entire two hours, Leatherheads is rarely less than very promising - and also rarely more," writes Scott Foundas in the Voice.

Updated through 4/6.

"The distance between Leatherheads' concerns and those of current audiences represents one kind of disconnect, I think," writes Godfrey Cheshire in the Independent Weekly. "Another is suggested by the mention of Howard Hawks, who directed screwball comedies back when the form was virtually a fine art in Hollywood. Now, on the evidence of this film and others, it's a lost art."

"The great 30s comedies had edge, bite and relentless forward momentum," writes Newsweek's David Ansen. "Leatherheads is laid-back, amiable and terminally tepid."

"[W]hile actor Clooney has the stuff to bring classic comedy back to the screen, director Clooney can't quite manage the feat," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC.

ScreenGrab's Scott Von Doviak quotes co-screenwriter Rick Reilly ("My writing partner, former Sports Illustrated colleague Duncan Brantley, and I wrote this thing 16 years ago! Sixteen years! Do you realize how many Joan Rivers faces ago that was?") and then notes that Reilly's involvement actually stretches back even further.

"Perhaps location shoots are an everyday thing, even an annoyance, in LA or New York," writes Paul Lieberman from Greenville, SC for the Los Angeles Times. "But they inspire fascination, and study, in places like this. Brookshire could tell you on which floor of the Westin Poinsett hotel 'George' was staying, where they went drinking, where 'Renée' got coffee, and which extras got a wink on the set - or a plum assignment."

Peter Hartlaub builds a "Football Movie All-Star Team" for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Update: "Setting a screwball comedy against the backdrop of the emergence of professional football in the 1920s sounds like a rollicking idea," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "The period songs and costumes are as jaunty as can be. And the casting of Clooney, our era's Clark Gable, as aging football star Dodge Connolly is a natural. So, why does the whole thing feel sloggier than the climactic game, a near-scoreless battle waged in a lake of mud?"

Updates, 4/5: "The picture labors so strenuously to approximate some of the old screwball spirit that it winds up in traction," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "The actors, writers and directors who made those old studio whirligigs spin - Clark Gable and Carole Lombard; William Powell and Myrna Loy; Preston Sturges and Frank Capra and all the rest - made it look easy. By contrast Leatherheads, the third and by a wide margin the weakest movie directed by George Clooney, looks to have been nearly as hard to make as it is to watch."

"If Clooney is often cited as the descendant of Cary Grant, Zellweger has demonstrated (specifically in Down With Love and Chicago) that she's at home in parts that might have gone to Rosalind Russell or Barbara Stanwyck," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times. "Matched wits in romantic comedies have gone the way of the gentleman's fedora and the lady's cloche, and it makes you wonder exactly why the comedies of the sexes wound up where they wound up."

"Given the unapologetically retro appeal of its two stars, and the frisky chemistry between them, Leatherheads isn't the movie it might have been," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "But it does have a breezy, affable spirit, and its very casualness is something that's extremely rare in mainstream movies these days. In a Hollywood system clogged with filmmakers desperate to prove how talented and indispensable they are, Clooney makes it look as if he's not trying too hard."

"If you're someone like me, Clooney stands out as an actor who's chosen roles exceptionally well (Michael Clayton, Syriana, Good Night, and Good Luck, Three Kings, the marvelous Out of Sight), and whose failures (Solaris, The Good German, Intolerable Cruelty) are often interesting ones," writes the New Republic's Christopher Orr. "If, by contrast, you're the head of a studio, he stands out as a guy who can't really open a movie."

Clooney's "exceptionally savvy about Hollywood movie history and seems to feel quite comfortable with his own place in it," writes Jim Emerson at RogerEbert.com. "Film fans used to speculate about whether Clooney could become the Cary Grant of our time, and now we know he's our Clark Gable and William Holden and Dean Martin, too."

Leatherheads "sometimes feels more like a directorial effort from a what-me-worrier like Danny Ocean than from the avowed political conversationalist Clooney," writes Ryan Stewart in Premiere. "Those expecting an ambitious Hail Mary pass or even something culturally relevant this time around are advised to look elsewhere, while football buffs and Clooneyheads not yet soured on the meta-movie star's palsy-walsy act may find a lot to enjoy."

Yes, Clooney directs, but: "As a producer, Clooney (who is not yet 50) has a more impressive record," argues David Thomson, blogging for the Guardian. "It includes oddball features such as A Scanner Darkly, The Half Life of Timofey Berezin, Wind Chill and Michael Clayton, not to mention Sand and Sorrow, a very good documentary on Darfur, and - of course - Syriana."

"'Screwball comedy' implies a certain snap and rotation - a velocity to the gags and a vector to the plot - but the people who made Leatherheads don't quite have the strength of arm or skew of angle to make Leatherheads truly screwball; it kind of fizzles out on the way to the plate," writes James Rocchi at Cinematical. "And that's not to say Leatherheads is charmless or unenjoyable or ill-made; it just isn't quite as good as the pedigrees and passions of the people involved would have you think it will (or, frankly, should) be."

"You want every retort to zing, if only because this is the only screwball in town," writes Justin Stewart for Stop Smiling. "In an age when they poured from the dream factory, audiences would be less apt to snag their enjoyment on the fumbles and false starts. A younger crowd tuned to Superbad doesn't know the genre, and older audiences mostly remember the classics; if the likes of His Girl Friday and Ball of Fire are the standards, Leatherheads can be forgiven for falling short."

"[T]oo much of Leatherheads feels like studied motions, and its charms never plaster over a story that takes forever to get going, and doesn't go too far once it does," writes Keith Phipps at the AV Club. "The scenes paying homage to Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, and the Keystone Kops look like they were fun to shoot and are generally fun to watch, but after a while, they start to feel like a cover act for someone else's greatest hits."

Richard Schickel in Time: "Maybe the film loses a little steam as it rolls along, but it is still puffing and tooting as Clooney and Zellweger ride off into the sunset - on a comically raffish period motorcycle, free as the wind."

"The only thing keeping Leatherheads from being a great movie versus simply a very good one is it's pacing," argues Brandon Fibbs at cinemattraction.

"Football, they say, is a game of inches, and so can be moviemaking, and Leatherheads is a completely charming film that comes a few inches from being a great one," writes the Oregonian's Shawn Levy.

"It's a bit slick in some places, slack in others, but that's the film's point about football, too," writes Ruth Graham in the New York Sun. "Sometimes following the rules takes the fun out of things."

Shorpy presents a shot of the real thing: "Washington, DC. November 3, 1923. High school football: 'Eastern v Central.'"

Interviews with Zellweger: Will Lawrence (London Times) and Lesley O'Toole (Independent).

John Patterson talks with Krasinski for the Guardian.

"You know, I am a fan of George Clooney's," writes David Poland. "But, man! This drama with WGA, reported with Variety today, is pretty petulant and excessive."

Updates, 4/6: "If I had a nickel for every newspaper that went with 'George Clooney fumbles'...," writes Paul Matwychuk, noting that the film hasn't scored all that well this weekend. "It's all a little too mild, a little too amiable, a little too content to bask in its own nostalgia. My God, you'd think it was a film about baseball."

For the LAT, Cristy Lytal profiles Arthur J Miller Jr, who "made sure that the trains ran on time on the North Carolina sets."

Posted by dwhudson at April 3, 2008 8:08 AM