The blind leading the blind: ‘Leatherheads’ and ‘21’

Quickly proving himself to be a competent director if only a limited actor, it seems that George Clooney has finally decided to directly confront the unfounded comparisons to Cary Grant that have followed him through his film career—and it results in something light, fluffy and completely forgettable.

In “Leatherheads,” Clooney directs himself in the role of Dodge Connelly, the quarterback and lead promotional huckster for the Duluth Bulldogs, a ‘20s-era pro-football team with the rotten luck to be playing a sport that’s quickly dying in the shadow cast by its collegiate counterpart. Smelling an opportunity to rescue himself from bankruptcy, Dodge manages to vamp his way into a deal to sign on college football’s most popular player and promotional tool Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski), who will hopefully bring his thousands of adoring fans along with him. But the sudden arrival of a spunky reporter from The Chicago Tribune (Renée Zellweger) is only bound to throw a wrench into those plans with strictly perfunctory love triangle drama.

After seeing him here and in “Michael Clayton,” I think my problem with Clooney lies in how he routinely mistakes his self-knowledge as a matinee idol for a genuine performance. In “Michael Clayton,” that meant excessive, world-weary navel-gazing; in a lighter effort like “Leatherheads,” it means a lot of sly smirking at the audience and disappointed facial expressions that superficially exude an aura of “well, gosh”—but really speak more to an attempt at self-deprecation. A healthy sense of humor is certainly welcome in this line of work, but Clooney goes decidedly overboard; I find a similar problem in Renée Zellweger, another absurdly overrated actor whose shtick in “Leatherheads” rests solely on a stale parody of the Hepburn characters from the ‘30s. You come to realize that the actors’ performances are a convenient indicator for why “Leatherheads” fails to click as a whole: when Zellweger and Clooney knock out a pair of policemen, steal their clothes and attempt to perform a Keystone Cop routine, you suddenly realize that the slapstick and speedy wordplay that permeate this film are trying a little too hard to pay homage to its forebears. Admittedly, there’s something worth discussing in the unsubtle suggestions that pro football was destined to lose something special and irreplaceable when it was forced to conform to a strict set of rules—maybe signs of a struggle to determine what the cinema has lost throughout the years, whenever it’s been forced to conform to technological expectations. There’s a beating heart behind the grand gestures and memorable faces of “Leatherheads,” but ultimately the mere suggestion of a bygone era isn’t enough to maintain interest for long.

I was nevertheless a little saddened to learn that “21” had beaten Clooney’s film rather soundly at the box office this past weekend, if only because “Leatherheads”’ heart is easier to discern. When all is said and done, however, “21” suffers from the same problems as “Leatherheads;” its dependence on its misguided aesthetic sense is another a matter of the blind leading the blind, saddled with the impossible task of sexing up the decidedly unsexy pastime of counting cards in blackjack. MIT student Ben Campbell (Jim Sturgess) needs a quick three hundred grand to back up his acceptance into Harvard Med—but it’s his analytical talents that attract the attention of villainous professor Mickey Sosa (Kevin Spacey), who’s gathering together a group of bright young mathematicians to take weekend trips to Vegas and break the various banks contained therein. It’s hardly an impossible feat to make a thrilling cinematic venture out of flipping cards over (see: “Casino Royale” and Dario Argento’s otherwise useless “The Card Player”), but there’s no real sense of danger in “21.” Despite the presence of a surly pit boss (Laurence Fishburne), there’s never any question that Ben will eventually get everything that he wants; genuine suspense simply can’t be cast aside in favor of quick-cut flashbacks and long sweeps across gambling tables in a transparent bid to make these scenarios out to be something more than what they are.