In countless stadiums across the country tonight, people will gather in the crisp autumn air to cheer on their local high school football team. It’s a uniquely American ritual that few movies have been able to adequately capture in all its glory — and agony.
Peter Berg’s new film, “Friday Night Lights,” has done it, a feat that elevates it to one of the best football films to be made in the last 50 years.
Based on H.G. Bissinger’s 1990 book, “Friday Night Lights” follows the entire season of a small Texas town’s high school football program. In 1988, Odessa, Texas had one thing to look forward to: Friday nights in Ratliff Stadium cheering on the Permian High Panthers. It’s not an understatement to say that football is a religion in this community, where businesses shut down to fill the stadium’s 20,000 seats, and play strategies are interpreted and dissected like biblical verses. The hopes and dreams of an entire town are fixated on this ritual, and its a heavy burden for the teenage boys who are the focal point of this unrelenting gridiron hero worship.
Coach Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton) is also clearly under a great deal of pressure to deliver a championship team. He’s fortunate to have a star in running back Boobie Miles (Derek Luke, “Antwone Fisher”). There’s also potential in tight end Brian Chavez (Jay Hernandez “Crazy/Beautiful”), quarterback Mike Winchell (Lucas Black, “Slingblade”) and tailback Don Billingsley (Garrett Hedlund, “Troy”). It looks to be another winning season until that sure thing is suddenly threatened by a devastating injury.
This may sound like the plot of any number of sports films, but “Friday Night Lights” is an entirely different animal. Filmed in a gritty, multi-layered documentary style, “Friday Night Lights” has an honesty that transcends those familiar football movie clichés — the troubled player, the hard-but-wise coach, the comeback play. All of those elements exist within the film, and yet Berg gives them an authenticity and integrity that reinforces that what is unfolding before the audience has its basis in real life.
The performances also strengthen the film’s depth. Billy Bob Thornton’s Gaines is a seemingly stolid man who can inspire confidence as easily as inspire fear in his players. But he also reveals a great deal of the man’s emotional depth and sympathies simply through his facial expressions. The breakthrough performance in the film has to be country singer Tim McGraw as Billingsley’s abusive alcoholic father. A former Panther all-star who realizes too late his fortunes peaked at the age of 18, McGraw gives Charlie a sympathetic complexity even as he menaces his son with his despair and rage.
“Friday Night Lights” doesn’t shy away from the brutal physical and psychological aspects of the game. The violence can be difficult to watch, yet there is also exhilaration in those moments of athletic triumph. Archetypal warriors they may be, waging battle, protecting their territory, but Berg suggest there is much more to this epic struggle than meets the eye. It may well be the definitive film on high school football culture.
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