About "The Damed United"

I saw "The Damned United" recently and listened to a Q & A with its star, Michael Sheen ("The Queen" and "Frost/Nixon"). The screenplay for "The Damned United," an adaptation of a novel about Brian Clough, one of England's most successful soccer (football) managers, is by Peter Morgan, who also wrote "The Queen" and "Frost/Nixon." Sheen explained how he and Morgan collaborated on the 'United' script while Sheen was working on "Frost/Nixon." Because both men had read the novel, which focuses more on Clough's failures, their back-and-forth dialogues provided the revisions for the script.

This movie is not really about soccer, but about the Shakespearean themes of pride and ambition, about Clough's character flaws that prove almost career ending. Clough is both hero and villain in this intriguing movie and Clough's friend and assistant manager Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall) brings out the best in him while Don Revie (Colm Meaney), the celebrated coach of the #1 team in England, Leeds United, brings out the worst. Clough was a controversial figure in the British press, opinionated and arrogant, but his behavior hides his pain at not being able to play soccer because of an injury. Sheen can be seen as the White Rabbit in "Alice in Wonderland" and as a character in the computer in a remake of "Tron."