Much has been said to point out that this film is not a sports film so much as it is a character study. It has also been pointed out that, beyond the basic events, it is a work of fiction. I will not comment on the people who managed to miss both these memos because I came to it expecting an interesting look at the male competitive psyche as was in the source material. What this approach offers makes the film much more appealing than the football film of the small club manager going on to big things (which it could also do) – this is perhaps also the reason why plenty of quality actors got involved as well. The end product is a perfectly fine film with solid drama and characters and it is just a shame that it is not a "great" film because of how it seems to pull itself one way or the other all the time.
You see, in terms of events, the scope of the book does not really deliver the "big" events (Derby pipping Leeds to the top on the First Division just sorta "happens"), nor does it really have a massive set piece that it is building to. It tries to set this up in the television interview with Clough and Revie but this doesn't have the spark or impact that it would need to in order to be classed as a set piece. All this is fine though because the film is not about events or about the set pieces of this time period but rather it is about the mind of Clough (as fictionalised here). In the book the material is set inside this head, allowing the focus to be here rather than on the events, so we experience events through this filter with everything impacted by this filter. The film struggles because we are not inside the character but rather outside looking in. This puts the events front and foremost as one would expect from a typical sports film. There are two downsides to this.
The first downside is the aforementioned lack of big narrative set pieces because, with the film as it is, this is what we are looking for at times. The bigger downside is that it means the film does focus on events more than the psychological aspects that the book tackles. You can see that it is constantly trying to do this but it has a lot of "events" to deliver and it does tend to get "bogged down" in these. This still manages to produce an engaging enough film, but you can see the potential and see the cast (Sheen particularly) able to deliver on it and it does feel like a shame that it did not to bring its focus to bare on this with the same success as the book. This is not me grumbling saying "the book is better" or ignoring that film is a different beast, I'm just saying that it is hard to ignore that the film doesn't achieve what it is so clearly trying to achieve – something that the book did.
The film is great when it comes to capturing period though. Whether it is the hideous wallpaper, the ideas of what "posh" is, the boardrooms full of smoking old men, the footballers living in terraced houses etc, it is a very nostalgic film that wears it very well. Sadly this atmosphere is evident rather than being background at times, again distracting from the real story, happening inside the characters. This is minimised though by having a very good cast. Sheen is very good yet again even if, here and there, his turns as Blair and Frost come out of nowhere and distract. He does seem to understand what he is doing here though and the film is best when it focuses on him in the difficult times. He is helped by a great turn from Spall, who perhaps simplifies his character a bit but does well anyway. The two of them work well off one another without Spall ever getting in Sheen's way. Meaney is a great bit of physical casting but he is also suitable in his performance, likewise Broadbent is a nice addition who turns it in.
The total film is an enjoyable drama with a slight comic edge to it but it does not succeed at what it clearly is trying to do. It gets tied up in events as one would expect in a film telling a story, and it does so at the expense of the internal stuff, which is what the film is actually build on. This does weaken it even if the events themselves are enough to engage and the character stuff is evident enough to work, if not to the point of it being great. Worth seeing but Damned United hurts itself by not going "all in" for either the film as events driven or the film as character driven, doing both pretty well but neither brilliantly.
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when they made the film, they discussed it alot with clough's family, the family did not like the book and tried to sue the author, so when the film idea arose, they chose to take out alot of the aspcts which made the book so good, this was done because the writer of the book is in fact wrote a piece of fiction surrounding non fictional events and only guessed and what clough was like, in real life he rarely swore and never used the word cunt. The movie is a let down if u expect a direct comparison to the book, but understanding cloughs family were resistant to the idea due to the lack of fact and correctness, this does rank as one of my favourites
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