palabras José Maria Alvarez Ortego

George Clooney directs and stars in Leatherheads, a romantic comedy with a screenplay written by Duncan Brantley and Dick Reilly. Clooney brings us to the roaring 1920’s, when the US were facing the dry law and the professional Football League was just starting.

Dodge Conelly is a football freak whose main determination in life is saving a league in crisis. To accomplish this, he tries to convince a college football star, Carter Rutherford (John Krasinski) to join his team. This player is the perfect guy: Great footballer, handsome, polite, a First World War hero, etc. Basically, the best person in the world to serve as figurehead for the fledgling league.

Renee Zellweger plays journalist Lexie Littleton. She is a beginner as a sports field, but her talent and ambition make her essential for the development of the plot.

The interesting love/hate relationship which blooms between those three characters, Dodge (Clooney), Carter (Krasinski), and Lexie (Zellweger), gives the movie the spark it needs. This film can be enjoyed by everyone, but obviously American football fans will be the ones most interested in the story of the beginning of the NFL.

In Leatherheads, Clooney shows he can combine his humoristic ‘touch’ (made of unique gestures and ways of looking into the camera) with a great ability of recreate the atmosphere of the olden times. In other words, there are parts of Leatherheads that harken back to Ocean’s Eleven, and still others that remind you of the look and feel of Good Night, and Good Luck.

The music, the cinematography, the rhythm of the dialogue, and a wonderful scene where Clooney and Zellweger kiss each other behind a light-up yellow background (pay attention to this scene) and other ‘strokes’ like that makes Leatherheads one of the best movies of the year so far.