Movie Review: Friday Night Lights

The clichéd line is never uttered, but without listening very carefully, you can hear its echo throughout Friday Night Lights. In Odessa, football is a way of life.

And, as is quickly shown, it is the only way of life for residents of this small Texas town, where state champions become legends and those who fall short become mere pariahs rejected even within their own families.

Based on H.G. Bissinger’s best-selling non-fiction book of the same title, the story chronicles Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton) and his Permian Panthers’ 1988 season from the first day of pre-season to its rousing conclusion on the turf of the Astrodome some months later. Thanks in large part to their nationally recruited running back, Boobie Miles (Derek Luke), the Panthers are widely projected to return the title to Odessa.

But when Miles suffers a torn knee ligament on a meaningless play in the fourth quarter of a blowout victory, hope immediately fades as a cadre of second-tier stars—led by Mike Winchell (Lucas Black), Brian Chavez ’93 (Jay Hernandez) and Don Billingsley (Garrett Hedlund)—grapples with the town’s smothering expectations en route to the championship game.

For those unfamiliar with elite high school football, the film is jarring to say the least. Though American society worships successful professional athletes, the cult following earned by these 17-year old high school seniors is, for the most part, less widespread. Director and co-writer Peter Berg rightly devotes more time to the Panthers’ trials in their daily lives—how they survive in the face of such intense scrutiny—than to their gridiron exploits to underscore that this isn’t just a game, but a profession.

That decision plays to the movie’s primary strength—solid acting across the board that hinges on gutsy performances from a slew of younger actors—and de-emphasizes the sexed-up action scenes that regularly plague football-themed movies. But Friday Night Lights does not always escape that temptation. Tackling scenes—choreographed by Allan Graf, whose previous body of work includes Any Given Sunday and The Waterboy—are often shot at too tight an angle for dramatic effect and come off as unnatural and disorienting, while the hits themselves are overly stylized and unrealistic. Passing sequences are more fluid and shot from positions that often mirror those shown during weekend broadcasts on television and are easier to tolerate.

But the on-field action merely bridges the far more interesting off-field subplots. Luke steals several early scenes with his depiction of Miles, then the barely literate, larger-than-life Heisman Trophy wannabe with a limitless ego—“It’s hard to be humble,” he says—but his best performance is reserved for Miles’ later realization that he is worthless because he can no longer play.

The surprise of the film, though, is the unexpected range of singer-turned-actor Tim McGraw, who plays Charlie Billingsley, Don’s father. Well cast as the former high school star and state champion he wishes his son were, McGraw perfectly embodies the strain that the town places on its youth, never relenting in applying that pressure. Though some of the scenes in which he embarrasses his son with his overbearing demeanor—Charlie at one point appears out of thin air as his son fondles his girlfriend on the couch, before taping his hands to a football after a pre-season fumble—McGraw makes the father’s irrational anger and desperation surprisingly believable and all the more heartbreaking.

Friday Night Lights isn’t perfect. Though the racist attitudes of many of the school’s boosters and fans are referenced in passing, they are certainly glazed over in an effort to make the story more Hoosiers than it really is.

But despite that artistic error, the Panthers’ tragedy and subsequent glory somehow come across as unadulterated anyway, a hurdle very rarely leaped by football movies.