Friday Light Nights
Universal
Starring: Billy Bob Thorton, Grover Coulson and Lucas Black
The Verdict: This is one football movie that is worth the watch.
3 1/2 stars out of 4 stars
In Odessa, Texas, high school football is a more religious experience than anything at a Sunday church service. The local stadium, home of the fabled Permian High Panthers, is as big as those of most small colleges. Local businesses shut down on game nights. Daily sports radio shows update fans on every inch of the team’s progress. The head coach receives threats of firing after a single loss.
On the first day of 1988’s in-season practice, head coach Gary Gaines (a beautifully reserved Billy Bob Thornton) tells his team indefatigably that they “WILL win State.” This isn’t a boast. It’s a call to arms. “Can you be perfect?” he asks.
The town, facing economic hard times, lives and dies on the hopes of a state championship. When the team wins, the town soars with pride. When the Panthers lose, the community turns against them. Based on a book by H.G Bissinger, “Friday Night Lights” examines how the young players of Permian High shoulder the burden of this extreme pressure year after year and why they would want to.
These are boys forced to be old before their times. Most of Odessa’s grown men still wear their championship rings from years past, and they confide to the younger generation of Panthers that high school football will probably be the highlight of their lives. After that, it’s a dull future full of “babies and memories.” Odessa’s not a town with many options for a young man.
Boobie Miles knows this all too well. He’s the unabashedly cocky star player who’s been groomed for sports stardom since his childhood by his caring, sad-eyed uncle L.V. (Grover Coulson). L.V. has created a minor monster in Boobie, but he’s done it with the best intentions. If super-talented Boobie can live up to his hype, he may land a scholarship that gets him out of Odessa for good.
Derek Luke plays Boobie with the puffed-up chest and wounded eyes of a loudmouth with a self-damaging secret; Boobie knows he’s a great ball player, but he also knows that if he ever gets hurt his life has no back-up trajectory. He’ll have peaked at 17.
Director Peter Berg works this central idea for all its worth, but he never overstates it. Indeed, dignified restraint is the grounding morality of “Friday Night Lights.” The screenplay, co-written by Berg and David Aaron Cohen, spotlights characters who recognize the pressures around them, face up to them, and do their jobs despite them.
Players like Mike Winchell and Ivory Christian come off as heroes not because off their on-field athleticism but because off their off-field integrity. Winchell, the Panther’s beleaguered quarterback, has a sick mother at home and worries constantly about his future, but once he hits the locker room, he’s a born leader. Before a goal line play in the final seconds of the film’s climactic championship game, Winchell huddles his offense together for one last time. Stoically, he calls the play, tells his teammates that he loves them all and breaks calmly to receive the most important snap of his young life.
Coach Gaines, too, is a beacon of restraint in the face of growing odds. When Boobie is sidelined with a knee injury in the first game of the season, Gaines knows his team’s chances for victory have been seriously diminished, but he doesn’t let on. Instead of nervously pacing about and assuring his young men that Boobie will be back in uniform next Friday, Gaines tells the team they played a great game and encourages them to enjoy the spoils of their victory. Only when he steps into the privacy of his office does he let his concern bubble to the surface.
Berg has shot his film in a quick-cut, snapshot style that conveys a lot with a little. At first, the camera work feels overly busy, overstuffed with hand-held shakiness and unforgiving zooms, but the gritty swirl of images soon becomes enveloping. “Friday Night Lights” is far more experiential than your average plot-driven sports drama, and Berg’s “you-are-there” framing gives the story a remarkably potent sense of setting.
Six years and 30 pounds ago, this critic used to strap on his own shoulder pads on Friday nights, and it’s amazing how right Berg gets the feeling of playing high school football, from the muffled din of the crowds to the sticky glow of the weight room to the antiseptic drone of the road-trip charter bus to the electric crispness of that fall night air. Sometimes the images come fast and furious, frenetic and disorienting, but that’s what it’s like out there on the field. Football games can be won and lost in the blinks of eyes, in the wakes of ugly turnovers and miracle plays, and “Friday Night Lights” pulsates with the same momentum of a well-played game. Berg captures the feelings of mounting adrenaline and subsequent euphoria and defeat with remarkable clarity, ratcheting up the tension in the final game until this critic got goose bumps.
Though Berg tends to over-idealize the mythical import of high school football in the grand scheme of things, his emotional payoffs are never cheap or unconvincing, due largely to the efforts of a uniformly excellent cast. Thornton is perfection as a man who cares much more about wasted potential than dashed expectations, and young Lucas Black is spookily authentic as the upright Winchell. Also surprisingly effective is country superstar Tim McGraw, who squeezes heartbreaking pathos from a secondary role as a hard-drinking football dad who’s more destructive than supportive.
“Friday Night Lights” is an imperfect film. It may have benefited from tighter focus on several key characters, particularly Coach Gaines, and from more emphasis on the technical aspects of the games played. Yet this is a film interested in themes far more resonant and complex than passing stats and defensive strategy.
After a grueling mid-season defeat, a dispirited Winchell asks Gaines if he ever feels cursed to fail. Gaines replies that he believes all curses are “self-imposed” and that winning and losing feel pretty much the same after the fact. What matters is how you feel about yourself when it’s all over and whether or not you can look your loved ones in the eye knowing you gave it your all. In other words, it’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game. A championship ring is a nice piece of jewelry, but it doesn’t show the true measure of a man.
Far from your standard formula sports melodrama, “Friday Night Lights” is a stirring, uplifting winner. It remembers high school football the way players do-fondly, realistically and with just a twinge of sadness.