Excellent biopic about the greatest manager in football history
Writer Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon, The Queen) and Michael Sheen team up for their third outing in this biopic on arguably the greatest football manager to have graced the game. Sheen plays Brian Clough, who is famous for taking Nottingham Forest to back-to-back European Cup titles (a feat that has yet to be matched). For such a legendary manager you would expect his biopic to be based around such extraordinary achievements but unusually the source material is taken from David Pearce’s novel of the same name, which focuses primarily on his tenure at Derby County and his disastrous 44 days with Leeds United.
While football might be the subject matter you don’t have to be a fan of the game to enjoy this film. I went with someone who hasn’t watched a game in his life and he enjoyed it just as much as me. There are only minimal football scenes anyway and most of it is archival footage. This is a film about the rise and fall of one man who just happens to be a football manager. It’s a universal tale of an act of hubris setting in motion a great Greek tragedy. Clough was a great manager but boy was he blinded by pride.
Michael Sheen gives his best performance to date in the lead role. His Clough is driven by unbridled ambition, partly fuelled by fellow manager Don Revie (Colm Meaney) of Leeds United. Revie not shaking his hand at a Derby v Leeds home game created Clough’s bloody-minded determination to stop at nothing to knock Revie off his perch. It’s this mindframe that led Clough to take on the Leeds United job after Revie was promoted to England Manager. It wasn’t the most logical appointment as Leeds were archrivals with Derby and played a very different style of football. Clough’s confrontational style (he called his new squad a bunch of cheaters in his first training session) was never going to match up with players who were fiercely loyal to their old manager.
The film takes on the unusual narrative strategy of flicking between two timelines. A large chunk of the film takes place during this 44-day reign of madness at Leeds while the other timeline goes back to when Clough took Derby from 2nd Division cannon fodder to 1st Division champions in only a few seasons. It could have made the film incohesive but this technique highlights what a man Clough was. He did have greatness inside him but it was marred by his egotism.
Regardless of his managerial strengths, the film makes it clear that he couldn’t have done it without his assistant manager, Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall). Spall provides great support in this role as he brings out humanism in Clough’s character. Taylor was just about the only person Clough would confide in and it was his great eye for talent that made him one of the best scouts in the game. They had worked together for over nine years when Clough took the Leeds job but sadly things turned sour in later years.
Like any biopic the chronology of certain events has been changed and some events have been fabricated to make it more cinematic but it’s close enough to the truth to provide an entertaining and moving insight into the mind of one of the greatest managers in any game not just football. It’s been 43 years since England last won the World Cup but watching The Damned United you can’t help but feel that if Clough had been given the job England wouldn’t be the perennial underachievers that they are today.
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