The Damned United

I wrote this as a response to Sam liking the film (I saw it a gala screening with the lead actor and director and was unimpressed at their lazy excuses for bad period details and sketchy Clough character development). But I now realise that Sam said he liked the film on his other blog. 

Anyway, to warn you off it / provide a counter-point, here's me.

I thought the film was quite poor, and too rigidly stuck to lousy stagey
British ideas of what constitutes drama. There's a scene where Clough and
Peter Taylor kiss and make up - it's meant to be the emotional centerpiece
of the film, but it just falls flat. Peter Taylor was a handsome man, and
arguably the brains of the operation on the football field. Plainly,
neither of these points are going to come across with Timothy Spall in the
role.

Worse still, Brian Clough was a very funny man, and apparently so nearly
all the time. But in the film, he's funny in public but boring behind the
scenes. Yet ex-pros have lots of great stories to tell about him. The
flatness of the dialogue to me derives from i) an unwillingness to do
anything but the most cursory research and ii) a chronic lack of
imagination. On point ii), this was clearly not the case with the book
which wildly invented all sorts of Clough craziness, but the film wanted to
appease the Clough family and neutralised everything about the man - both
real and imagined.

So it was a pleasure to see the real Brian Clough on the ITV documentary
the other week. But the thread of the doc which followed Nigel from Burton
back to Derby was a disaster. I'd always thought that his confused look in
The Impossible Job was Graham Taylor's fault - as over-complex instructions
delivered in random coin-any-idiom English simply bamboozled the poor lad.
Either Taylor's damage to Nigel's brain was permanent, or he's just always
been like that. There must have only been room for one Clough ego at home.
Barbara!