| RATING: | 60% |
| FORMAT: | DVD |
Interesting film about Brian Clough marred by an inability to get under his skin to discover the real man. Despite the high quality acting the writing lets everyone down. It offers no insights into what motivated both Peter Taylor and Mr Clough to become such great football impresarios – with the latter easily the best (& most loudmouthed) of all British soccer managers. What little is offered is delivered by actors psycho-analyzing each other as on a stage - rather than in a movie theater; violating the old rule about show not tell in the cinema.
Clough believed the game to be 'beautiful', unlike his arch rival Don Revie who insisted on a win at all costs mentality that inevitably countenanced illegal tackles and downright cheating.
A contemporary theme of White nostalgia is well mined here for the glory days of the British past in sharp contradistinction with the apparently uncertain present and future. However, nostalgia is always rose-tinted and finds heroes and villains where there are none. The past is shown as both strange and familiar as we are supposed to laugh at the strange seventies' haircuts and clothes while escaping from the alleged greater sophistication of the present. This loving recreation of the recent past tries to have it both ways but finds no protein rich meat for its drama – as if in depth character analysis were somehow now a dirty word for playwrights. The old proverb that truth is stranger than fiction has little meaning here since this truth is essentially a trite soccer obsessives' pub tale.
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