Friday Night Lights Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)October 12th, 2004
Jonathan Richards
FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS
Directed by Peter Berg
With Billy Bob Thornton, Derek Luke
PG-13, 117 minutes
IN THE NAME OF THE FOOTBALL…
Odessa lies in a hard-baked landscape that stretches across West Texas like a burnt tortilla under a merciless bleached-blue sky broken only by oil rigs and spiraling footballs. On Friday nights through the autumn months the town assembles under banks of lights in the local cathedral, a huge football stadium that would be the envy of an Ivy League university, to live or die with the fortunes of its Permian High School Panthers. Welcome to adolescence, Texas-style.
"Do you feel seventeen?" one of the players asks another. "I sure don't." To be fair, they don't look seventeen – most of the actors range from their early twenties to as high as thirty. I mention this only because their physical maturity detracts from one of the crucial emotional and ethical impacts this story offers: the fanatical pressures that come to bear on young men only a decade removed from day care, and still a year away from the military.
In 1990, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist H.G. Bissinger spent a season with the football team at Odessa's Permian High. His tale of that tumultuous fall has been brought to the screen by director Peter Berg (Very Bad Things), a cousin of the author. The movie focuses on five principal characters: the star running back Boobie Miles (Derek Luke of Antwone Fisher), the insecure quarterback Mike Winchell (Lucas Black, Cold Mountain), the brow-beaten blocking back Don Billingsley (Garrett Hedlund), the courtly coach Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton), and the football-obsessed town of Odessa.
The Panthers – or the Mojo, as they are popularly known – are expected to win. Not just games, but the state championship. A single loss has the impact on the population of a terrorist attack. Coach Gaines, in his first year at the helm, inherits the tradition of five past Permian championships, and any result short of taking the team all the way to glory will have him consulting his travel agent. When he returns home after an early season loss, he finds that FOR SALE signs have sprung up on his lawn like mushrooms after a rain, and his wife starts studying travel brochures for Alaska. "Maybe they don't take football as seriously up there," she says hopefully. Everywhere Coach Gaines goes he gets advice. At dinner parties his host and hostess offer suggestions on how to design his defense. Civic boosters invade his office to suggest plays and strategies. Irate fans calling the local radio station demand his scalp when things go badly; "And you know what else it is?" a caller complains. "They're doin' too much learnin' at that school!" It's the same for the players – free food and free advice at fast-food joints, cops pulling them over with baleful stares to ask "You guys gonna win?", over-interested parents (country singer Tim McGraw is powerful as an obsessed father), and predatory girls collecting sexual notches on their belts.
The hopes of the Mojo ride on the fleet feet and wizardly moves of their star ball-carrier, Boobie Miles. He's an irrepressible force of ego and talent. "I get straight A's," he tells the local press. "Only one subject, football." When another player worries that he hasn't done his lifts in the weight room, Boobie laughs. "This talent is God-given," he crows.
But what the Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away. A hard tackle in the opening game damages his right knee. Suddenly the Mojo has to rely on the skills of the supporting cast, and while Coach Gaines gives lip service to the notion that it's a team game, he and we and they know it means serious trouble.
This is one of those sports movies that like to live in a world of all or nothing. With Boobie at full strength, they kick the tar out of the opposition. When he goes down, they can't lick the Little Sisters of the Poor. They rally and get it back, and kick posterior for the rest of the season. Then they come to the regional championship game, and get pushed around like rag dolls. They are forced to rely on the vagaries of a coin toss to determine which two of three teams with identical records will go into the state tournament. It's a tense scene, but if I mention that it comes two-thirds of the way through the movie, that should tell you all you need to know. When they finally reach, as in a movie they must (although not apparently that season in real life), the State Championship game, they are once again reduced to a bunch of Davids without slingshots coming up against Goliath. Goliath is big, and bad, and black. There are definite overtones of racism in this final section, as black coaches bully and intimidate and a black referee skews a call.
The football is expertly staged, with (mostly) believable action and deafening sound effects of the crunch of bodies and pads. The acting is all good, with special honors due Thornton as a coach who knows when to scream and when to coddle. His "Win one for the Boober" halftime talk in the big game is a model of modulation. Luke also delivers a standout performance as the cocky, ebullient Boobie, who sees his future shrink from NFL millions to a garbageman's coveralls in the blink of an eye.
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