Friday
Night Lights arrived this weekend with plenty of advance hype. Inescapable TV ads called it “the greatest
sports film ever,” though folks in my household were skeptical.
Well, put skepticism aside. The story of an almost-championship season
for an Odessa, Texas, high-school football team
powerfully
shows the compromises, tragedies, and triumphs of big-time sports
played by
vulnerable adolescents. Maybe not the
“greatest,” but definitely in the running.
The film opens with a rapidly
cycling montage: the quarterback studies plays with his mother; the
star
running back hones his body on solitary runs; incessant talk-radio
chatter provides
the sound track and shows the intensity of fan interest.
The first day of practice has more spectators
than Friday night’s football game between Central and Spearfish.
Establishing shots of the West
Texas
landscape reveal a land so flat it makes Aberdeen
seem hilly, and dry, burned to a uniform brownness.
Long reaches of blacktop stretch into the
distance with only the occasional pickup to mark human activity. The sky is washed to a bright white, not even
a hint of blue. We get the message –
life here is tough. Small wonder
everyone wants out.
The bleakness of the landscape
make the
town’s one imposing edifice, the 25,000-seat high school stadium, stand
out all
the more. If you are 17 and male, the
road out of Odessa
leads through that stadium.
As if that weren’t pressure
enough,
everyone in town expects a state championship; nothing else will do.
When the
team loses its second game after the star running back injures his
knee,
a small forest of “For Sale” signs sprouts on the coach’s lawn, and
former
hometown stars fill the airwaves, proclaiming his coaching decisions
“stupid.” Is it any surprise the quarterback (Lucas Black) almost never
smiles?
Sports films typically revolve
around a group of familiar “types,” and Friday Night Lights is
no
exception. There’s the shy quarterback,
who must cope with his mentally ill mother as well as opposing
defenses; flashy
back Boobie Miles (Derek Luke), who backs up his boasts with the kind
of
performance that fills the stands with big-time college recruiters;
“bad boy”
Don Billingsley (Garrett Hedlund), whose biggest battles are with an
abusive,
drunken father (Tim McGraw), who is trying to relive his own glory days
through
his son.
As coach Gary Gaines, Billy Bob
Thornton is totally convincing– alternately tender and caring about his
players, screaming at them for their errors on the field, stoic about
the calls
for his head whenever the team falters. Thornton has the
face and
manner of an ordinary guy, and they serve him well here.
The
film emphasizes the youth of the heroes on which the town’s hopes
depend –
through the baby face of the backup (Lee Thompson Young) who becomes a
star when
Boobie goes down, and through dialogue that repeatedly makes the point
that
even the seniors are only 17.
Based on the true story of the
1988 Permian
Panthers, Friday Night Lights has the slightly grainy feel of a
documentary. Moments of intense action –
football
practice, game action, sexual grappling between two teenagers – are
filmed with
swift, impressionistic cuts that convey the sense of what is happening
without
explicitness.
One great shot conveys all of the
tension and sorrow of the do-or-die football life in West Texas: Boobie empties his football locker,
then sits in the car
with the uncle who has raised him (Grover Coulson, perfectly cast with
a
majestically weathered face). The camera
lingers tensely on their two faces against a featureless white sky
before
Boobie, who has swaggered through everything to this point, breaks down
in
mourning for all he has lost: his season, his major-college
scholarship, his
future as a pro – his ticket out.
“Sports film”? With scenes like that, this is a movie that
transcends its genre. Even if you can’t
tell a center from a center fielder, this movie will make you care
about its young
heroes.