The Damned United (3/5); Genova (2/5); Tyson (3/5); Traitor (2/5)

The Damned United
(Tom Hooper):
Michael Sheen, Timothy Spall,
Colm Meaney
Running time: 97 minutes (15A)


Here’s a football movie with tattered charm, an homage to the days before champagne boys and plutocrats took over. The Damned United, based on David Peace’s novel, is the story of controversial football manager Brian Clough and his 44 days in charge of Leeds in 1974.
Thankfully, there’s little football: instead it focuses on Clough’s hubristic personality – the ‘cocky northeast twat’ who took Derby County from the bottom of the second division to the top of the first; who fell out with his (equally talented) assistant manager Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall), and who crashed and burned at the unruly Leeds United.
Michael Sheen is in full impersonation mode as Clough. His head smirks and wobbles like a jack-in-the box; his Middlesbrough accent swings like a valley. Sheen is in danger of becoming the Mike Yarwood of his generation, but he’s always watchable. Colm Meaney is in growling form as Don Revie, the former Leeds United manager. And Peter McDonald’s Johnny Giles doesn’t even slip a smile, so no change on that front.
There are some lovely moments: Clough scrubbing the then second-division Derby’s dressing rooms out of respect for Leeds in an FA Cup tie; and later, pacing the backroom floor, too nervous to even watch a game.

Genova
(Michael Winterbottom):
Colin Firth, Catherine Keener, Hope Davis, Willa Holland, Perla Haney-Jardine
Running time: 94 minutes (15A)

Roberto Rossellini’s beautiful Journey to Italy is the guiding hand behind Michael Winterbottom’s Genova. It opens with an ominous, superbly-controlled nail-biter: Marianne (Hope Davis) is driving with her two daughters Mary (Perla Haney-Jardine) and Kelly (Willa Holland). They banter and then the screen goes blank. A car accident takes Marianne’s life. Their father, university lecturer Joe (Colin Firth), has to pick up the pieces. He moves them to Genoa for a year where old pal Barbara (Catherine Keener) helps them settle in.
Winterbottom creates an easy intimacy. He fills his film with moments of escape and dread. Like Journey to Italy, Winterbottom uses the unfamiliar Italian setting to tease out feelings: Mary’s guilt, Kelly’s resentment amidist Joe’s stoical parenting. Small moments become threatening; Genoa’s dark alleyways psychologically menacing. Winterbottom creates a sense that life goes on, but his ending is a contrived, hammed-up version of Rosselini’s.
And Firth doesn’t feel right: there are not enough layers to his character. He finds it much too easy to get on with his life for my liking.

Tyson
(James Toback):
Mike Tyson
Running time: 90 minutes (IFI Club)


Mike Tyson talks about Mike Tyson. The lisping, soft-voiced giant is painfully honest, a former heavyweight boxing champion who today is a heavy-faced man of 42 with sorrowful eyes and perfect teeth. A troubled character emerges from the reputation of a monster. He narrates a journey from bullied, overweight child to petty crime, to juvenile centres and boxing to the world stage. He had a staggering inferiority complex and used boxing to channel his anger.
Director James Toback lets Tyson do the work and helps out with old footage and some irritating split-screen inserts. Tyson speaks with a sense of new-found self-awareness and amazement about his life. “Who would ever think,” he says, “a poor boy from Brooklyn would have a parade thrown for him in Moscow?” He gets cut up and teary-eyed. He used the pain of untreated gonorrhoea to win his first world champion fight. He was a serial cheater. He discusses his rape conviction, the ear-biting and the hundreds of millions he passed through his hands. He reads from ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ (‘Each man kills the thing he loves’), though I wonder if Wilde’s redemptive ‘The Selfish Giant’ would have been better.

Traitor
(Jeffrey Nachmanoff):
Don Cheadle, Guy Pearce, Said Taghmaoui, Jeff Daniels, Neal McDonough
Running time: 114 minutes (15A)

I was beginning to get nervous that Hollywood would smarten its politics under Obama and stop producing daft al-Qaeda-style terror thrillers. No fear. Jeffrey Nachmanoff, writer of The Day The Earth Wet Its Pants (AKA The Day After Tomorrow) is responsible for this silly affair. It stars Don Cheadle as a seemingly troubled Muslim and Sudanese-American. He’s also a former US Special Forces soldier who joins a terrorist cell in Yemen, blows up an embassy in France and finds an FBI agent in the shape of Guy Pearce (snoozing) on his tail.
Traitor is crisply shot, with handhelds to give it that rough-and-ready sun-kissed feel. But the plot (a plan to blow up 50 buses across the US at the same time) is stapled together and the dialogue written as if to fill the gaps.
Cheadle’s despondent face is always worth watching, but this is beneath him. He does solitary in a Yemeni prison and emerges blinking into the light with a sculpted beard. The movie has ham-fisted liberal intentions and lectures at all available opportunities the value of mutual religious respect.