2.Main Content
The Damned United
Thu, 14 May 2009
A portrait of one of Britain’s most opinionated sporting personalities, Peter Morgan’s adaptation of The Damned United sees the writer of The Queen and Frost/Nixon facing up to a twin challenge: shaping David Peace’s 2006 novel into a story which works on screen, and doing so within the factual constraints of manager Brian Clough’s ill-fated 1974 tenure at Leeds Utd FC. This he achieves in fine form, with a combination of biopic, love story, cautionary tale plus a bit of men-on-a-mission….and you thought it was just about football!
As ever, spoilers ahead, in this review from Trevor Johnston, so if you don’t want to see the scores look away now!
‘Fucking brilliant’ were Stephen Frears’ words when he pushed a copy of ‘The Damned United’ into Peter Morgan’s hands, though with its wealth of sporting detail and an incantatory interior monologue form that keeps us claustrophobically locked within Brain Clough’s obsessive thoughts, the novel places the onus on the screenwriter to find a clear through-line in the midst of the madness. There’s always an issue of pros and cons with biographical material, in that the factual element helpfully supplies the plotting, yet the screenwriter needs to divine a strong sense of motivation in the central character to give weight and meaning to events which could risk seeming merely episodic. 
The screen version of The Damned United broadly retains the novel’s structural conceit of using Clough’s turbulent 44 days at Elland Road as the spine of the story, on which is hung a series of flashbacks explaining the events and personalities which brought him to managerial prominence and the Leeds job in the first place. That means a lot of exposition (and a lot of football) to get through, so it’s crucial that the key character issues are laid out clearly to give audiences a way into the drama.
Biographical questions
‘Cloughie’, as he was so often referred to, seems as though he hardly needs an introduction for those of a certain generation, yet the contradictions in the man make his story suited to biopic treatment. Lets ask the ‘Six Essential Questions’ to see how it plays out on screen:
(i) Who is this man? A famed football manager and media personality who dominated English football from the late 60s to the early 80s, but whose charisma and idiosyncratic wit endeared him to a constituency stretching beyond the game itself. Cast the brilliant Michael Sheen and we’re definitely interested.
(ii) What does he want? He thinks he’s the best manager in the country so he wants his team to win the league – but more than that, he’s obsessed by getting one up on successful Leeds manager Don Revie, who once blanked him at a cup-tie. When Revie leaves Leeds for the England post in 1974, Clough senses his chance for revenge by bettering Revie’s achievements.
(iii) What does he need? When a man says of himself ‘Brian Clough über alles’ it’s evident to everyone (but perhaps not, as yet, himself) that he needs a little humility.
(iv) What’s standing in his way? Revie’s team, moulded in Revie’s image, don’t want to play for Clough, and he doesn’t have time to remould them before the new season. Significantly, he’s without the right-hand man, Peter Taylor, who’s been an essential part of his managerial accomplishments up until now. Can Clough now do a job at Leeds with only himself to rely on, when there are mutterings from the dressing room that Peter Taylor had all the talent? Easy to see how this feeds into the humility issue mentioned above.
(v) Why should we care about this person? He’s an idealist. He wants his teams to play the beautiful game as it should be played. And he’s much more fun than grim-faced Don Revie.
(vi) What’s at stake? English football is in crisis. The World Cup holders of 1966 have failed to qualify for the 1974 tournament. Clearly, at some point, the talents of Brian Howard Clough will come into play at national level.
So, in plot terms, it’s a case of whether Clough can get his revenge on 
Revie by dismantling the latter’s Leeds team and getting them to play better for him – an outcome which becomes progressively more unlikely the further the season goes on. But in terms of the meaning of the story, you have to look at what’s happening in that up-for-grabs area between ‘What does he want?’ and ‘What does he need?’. He needs humility, that much is obvious, but if he’s a brilliant success at Leeds and tramples Revie’s record into the mud, the last thing he’ll get out of that is humility. Which is why this is such a fascinating story – as events proceed which will be the making or unmaking of this man, something has to give…we’re just not sure what it’ll be, and that’s exactly what keeps us watching.
Men on a mission
As has already been intimated, this is all structured by moving back and forth between ‘present’ (Clough’s time at Leeds in 1974) and ‘past’ (Clough and Taylor’s years at Derby from 1968 onwards). In order to understand why it’s all going wrong for Clough at Leeds, we need to see how it went so right for Clough and Taylor at unfashionable Derby County, a team they moulded into League Champions. This is not unrelated to the men-on-a-mission outline that we see in war movies and heist pics, where planning and training sets up the template, then there’s tension in whether the team can execute it on the day. It’s important here because for those audience members who couldn't care less about football, all this has to be laid in place so we can understand what’s worth celebrating about Clough and how his flaws manifested themselves.
What’s clarified here is just how much the early success at Derby was predicated on Taylor’s ability to sniff out the right player in the right role, something which is obviously not the case when Clough inherits Revie’s team, a squad crammed with international talent and egos to match. As the back-and-forth time structure proceeds apace, using captions, graphics and archive footage to keep the audience straight, it’s soon increasingly obvious that Clough’s Leeds adventure is doomed to failure. Football fans will know this already, but as the viewers begin to feel they’ve got the rest of the film all mapped out, how to prevent it from becoming all too predictable?
Shifting the goalposts
Peter Morgan at The Script FactoryTo a certain extent, David Peace’s original novel feeds off a compelling sense of doom, as Clough’s maniacal caprices dig him into a deeper and deeper hole, but Morgan took a brave decision to wring more positives from it than are there on the page. Of course, that strong strand of cautionary tale remains in the film too as Clough takes up the challenge at Leeds, then one of the giants of English football, and allows his vanity to make a right old cock-up of it. However, since we realise that this is virtually inevitable, it means that the ‘what does he want?’ part of the story is losing its tension, but the ‘what does he need?’ element of the narrative is still tantalisingly unresolved. The answer here is to direct the audience’s attention away from the one and towards the other, and Morgan comes up with a particularly ingenious device, spotlighting that shift through an attention-grabbing once-only break in the past-as-template-for-the-present time structure.
Handily, it comes at a moment of crisis in the ‘what does he want?’ strand. Leeds are on a losing streak. Clough is spending too much time alone in a hotel room, he’s previously called Don Revie at two in the morning to tell him that the latter’s bastard players won’t play for him, now he’s on the line to Peter Taylor, begging him to leave his own solo management job at Brighton and come to Leeds. Taylor turns him down with the emphatic line ‘Not after what was said’.
But we don’t know what was said, because we haven’t had that scene yet. What did go on to split asunder this dream-team coaching combo? Suddenly the suspense has kicked back in, and the film’s motoring again. Brilliant.
I’m nothing without you
What we go on to discover is that Clough’s egotism lost both of them their jobs at Derby, even after all they did for the club, since he tendered a joint resignation letter (without consulting Taylor, naturally) in an act of brinkmanship against the long-suffering chairman – and was shocked that the board accepted it. Taylor had lined up a new post for both of them at Brighton and Hove Albion, another lowly club they could build up together, but Clough, after shaking hands on the deal, takes up an offer from post-Revie Leeds instead. Taylor is left on his own, words are spoken, Taylor calls Clough a ‘nothing!’, Clough calls Taylor ‘nothing’s parasite!’.
After all the happy times we've seen them share before now, this is where it also becomes apparent we’ve hit the boy-loses-boy stage of the love story. Will there be a tearful reunion?
Yes, but it’s only after he’s forced out of the Leeds job, and – even worse – made to look foolish on a TV talk show by surprise guest…Don Revie. With his dreams in tatters, there’s nothing for it but for Clough to realise that humility is the way forward. It’s a last-minute reversal, which leads the love story to a satisfying boy-gets-boy resolution, though there’s some highly entertaining grovelling in Peter Taylor’s front garden to be done first. ‘I’m nothing without you’ indeed.
Cynics might contend that Clough’s sudden intake of humble pie looks like a bit of tacked-on feelgood. Football history says otherwise, since together Clough and Taylor went on to prove a legendary partnership winning the European Cup twice with Nottingham Forest, another modest club they built from the ground up. 
As the film comes to a close with delightful archive of the real Clough and Taylor lauding their extraordinary achievements, it’s here that the film’s controlling idea is finally made manifest: talent and ambition require humility for true success. A notion not exclusively, you’ll note, about football.
Hints and tips
• Bio-pics can be a wonderful source of material, since the plot is already laid out for you, but they do require a strong motivating force to shape the central character and an controlling idea which is richer and wider than a mere act of portraiture.
• Setting up a time structure which works by cutting back and forth into the present, showing how it compares to the template set by the past, is very effective at generating interest. However, if the pattern becomes too predictable there’s a risk that tension will sag – varying the options can be an effective device, especially since such variation can be used to spotlight especially significant story information.
• Audiences are so familiar with the tripartite structure of the classic love story that showing a break-up between the two key characters almost leads to an expectation that they’ll be reunited. Playing with this expectation can again be helpful in creating story momentum and generating tension. And yes, you can have a platonic love story between two straight football managers….but best not to try and write that one again for quite a while…
©Trevor Johnston/The Script Factory 2009
If you'd like to discuss this review with Trevor Johnston you can email him at info@scriptfactory.co.uk - and to read other reviews by Trevor click here.