Friday Night Lights

Friday Night Lights follows in the tradition of high school sports movies in painting an underdog team facing insurmountable odds to go all the way to the championship game. This film has opened to much buzz and much acclaim as it portrays not only a football team, but the football obsessed town in which the team plays. Much has been made in recent years of the way sports can be shown on the field with steady cams, football eye view and a lot of the other tricks that can’t be used in real games. Here the football footage isn’t expected to carry the film as a well respected cast shoots more for a character portrayal than a grunting sports saga. It is a good thing too because with the heightened expectations some of the football sequences can leave the audience a little flat but the main characters made the film rise above just the passable level.

Was it just me or did this film make you hate just about everyone in Texas? Friday Night Lights tells the story of the 1988 Midland-Odessa Permian football team in their pursuit of the state championship. When the film begins Coach Gary Gaines has a plan and a complete team that is expected to win the state championship. Not just expected, demanded to win the state championship by the town of Odessa which doesn’t really seem to have much else going for it. This sets up very demanding townspeople and a tremendous amount of pressure on the coach and his team of 18 year olds.

Anyone who has been to West Texas knows that it is quintessential flyover country. There is nothing there but a lot of dirt and a lot of flat land as far as the eye can see spotted occasionally with an oil derrick. Here live a hearty breed of Texans whose lives revolve around the weekly Friday night game and who regularly caravan long distances to cheer on their team in other towns. This film studies them as much as it does the troubled youths who make up the football team and it is this angle that makes Friday Night Lights stand out from many of its counterpart films. There is the pushy elite of the town, the council and the benefactors who seem to give the coach more sideline coaching than he needs and threaten his job if a Permian High Panthers championship isn’t delivered. There are also the less fortunate of the town, like the player’s father whose whole life culminated in a championship win decades ago and went downhill after high school. There are parents who demand a lot both on and off the field from their sons skewing reality in a football or nothing sort of world.

Billy Bob Thornton does an admirable job playing Coach Gary Gaines who is a skilled coach expected to perform the miraculous as a matter of course. He has been with the team for two years, so he is an outsider, and the town leaders lean on him heavily not only badgering him to win, but in giving him advice when things turn sour. His wife and daughter are almost non-entities in a life filled with football sitting on a For Sale sign strewn lawn after a loss and asking if it is time to move again. I missed the repartee and the stress associated with being a coach’s wife that was shown so beautifully with Herb Brook’s wife in Miracle. It seems strange that more time was spent with Don Billingsley, Garrett Hedlund and his relationship with his father Charles, played by a dynamic and convincing Tim McGraw, than in Coach Gaines’s dynamic with his family since Billy Bob Thornton is the star of the film.

Of course things go badly for the team. If there was no conflict they would not have made a movie out of it. The team is good, but not great, their star running back is a cocky senior named Boobie Miles, Derek Luke playing with aplomb and cockiness reminiscent of Terrell Owens or any of the other superstar receivers of the NFL, who is expected to break all team records and carry the team’s offense thus shoring up a less than stellar defense. And Boobie does all of these things, for one game, unfortunately he also tears his knee at the end of the blowout. Thus things go badly for the team and the coach as they are trounced the next game and try to reorganize for a Boobie-less offense. Meanwhile Boobie tries to play again on a bum knee and ponder a life without football, the only thing he and his uncle, an understated Grover Coulson, have studied since Boobie was old enough to walk.

As with every high school sports movie we are introduced to a few stereotypical characters though here they seem a little more real and flawed. There is Mike Winchell, Lucas Black, the serious quarterback who is self-critical and has the added burden of taking care of his ill mother. There is Brian Chavez, Jay Hernandez, a smart Hispanic tackle who plays for fun because he already has his ticket to college and out of the town wrapped up in a college scholarship. Then there is the receiver Don Billingsley who can’t catch the ball. His father was the star of an earlier championship team and the rest of his life has never lived up to that moment. He is still stuck in Odessa drinking his life away and brutally teaching his son the importance of football the way his father taught him. The young cast of this film does an admirable job of carrying some very intense dramatic moments of the film but the vying stories seem to take the story in too many directions and remove focus from the star of the film, the coach Billy Bob Thornton, and the team’s football ambitions.

This movie reminded me significantly of Remember the Titans but I think that I enjoyed Remember the Titans a little better. Friday Night Lights is a film that takes itself very seriously, almost a little too seriously, with all of the pressure on these teens. Aside from a couple of parties early on in the season these kids look like they aren’t having any fun at all and the only mention of school is when Boobie struts in the hall. The football scenes were close and intense in a way that only the movies can do, but they lacked the audience attachment that Remember the Titans achieved. I remember people applauding and sighing with relief when the Titans made first downs and won games. Friday Night Lights did not have that same sports intensity that I have come to expect in movie sports. If it comes down to recent sports movies go out and rent Miracle or Remember the Titans before you move on to Friday Night Lights.

Related posts:

1. Wimbledon
2. Miracle