Sad, Depressing, Well Told Tale of Texas H.S. Football Passion Run Amok

Rating: 8/10 (27 October 2004)

[Disclaimer: I have no interest in sports and know virtually nothing about football.]
High school football has come to the big screen in the past couple of years in two forms. One is Coca-Cola's rousing, high production values commercial, "Football Town, USA," suffered through by untold millions of moviegoers. In this bouncy, spirited attempt at thirst-creating, people of all ages and races come together for a weekend football game played by competitive but fair and clean-cut youths. Winning is important but community esprit, cemented naturally by a shared passion for the nation's best selling cola drink, is paramount.
Then there are films based on true events like "Remember the Titans" and the now showing "Friday Night Lights." "Remember the Titans," a good flick, focuses on the experience of a black coach taking over a team in a southern town still gripped by an epoch of legalized racial discrimination. The coach comes out a winner: he's high school football's version of "They Call Me Mr. Tibbs."
"Friday Night Lights" faithfully follows the book of the same name by H. G. Bissinger, a bestseller and a very good read. Bissinger spent a year tracking the Odessa, Texas Permian High School Panthers, a team that had done very well in previous years. Not a typical sports book, Bissinger acted more as an investigative reporter looking at a microcosm of the role of high school football in American community life. He accurately portrayed Odessa for what it is: a city perennially on the cusp of economic disaster, riven by racial antagonism and with an obsessive interest, make that a fanatical devotion, to securing brief moments of communal glory through the blood (often literally) and guts of teens whose success in life may well reach, then and now, its apex in the stadium.
Bissinger's book might have been a national bestseller but his appearances at Odessa bookstores were canceled because of apparently serious threats to his life. So maybe the locals didn't care for the book.
Billy Bob Thornton is superb, convincing and committed as Coach Gary Gaines who in 1998 tried to take his Panthers to the state finals to become the champs, "to win State." His Gaines is alternately brooding and encouraging, supportive and snarling as he puts his kids through a training regimen far longer than what Marine recruits go through and only marginally less taxing.
Gaines's team lives in a surreal world where at every twist and turn locals from trailer trash to state troopers to politicos accost them and wish them well while making it clear they they HAVE "to win State." Gaines can't go to Wal-Mart without being stopped by people with power who make it clear that the coach's livelihood depends on winning. Parents and relatives drive their teens to win, no matter what, partly because a championship may bring a winning scholarship and release from the uncertainty of an Odessa future.
Girls casually sleep with these "heroes" who must cope with expectations they can't be sure of meeting. All the young actors [see the IMDb.com main page for this film for their names] reflect confusion alternating with confidence. But the mania of the Odessa community is both gripping and appalling. Seventeen-year-old football players are interviewed by the news media and peppered with questions at the level of grim seriousness generally associated with reporters challenging public figures.
Director Peter Berg kept "Friday Night Lights" from eliding into a boringly typical sports film by devoting much time to the individual lives, some very unhappy, of the team members. Special kudos go to veteran cinematographer Tobias A. Schliessler whose tight, quick, focused shots of Gaines and his players generate a continuing tension. In the critical half-time locker room scene which could have been a familiar stereotype, Berg goes rapidly back and forth between the Panthers and their rivals, the Carters. The effect is to emblazon the universality of the football experience for all the players. Gaines's pep talk is saved from conventional triteness by Thornton's deep immersion in his role.
"Friday Night Lights" avoids racial divisiveness in Odessa - the book deals with that quite well. Here the Panthers, an integrated team, seem to have no race-based tensions. The Carters, their final rivals, is an all-black team and there's brief allusion to the reality of the permeation of bigotry in Texas high school sports but it's really irrelevant to the main story.
Recently, Billy Bob Thornton appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart where he related the experiences of his sports coach father. Thornton opined that the extreme community interest in high school sports and in winning as the only acceptable outcome is a reality he knew about first-hand.
Gaines is a sympathetic figure as he tries to guide his players but Thornton also invests the character with an apparent, uncomfortable and unacknowledged recognition that he also colludes with the community ethos that sadly makes high school sports the apex of the team members' lives. It shouldn't be that way. Perhaps we need a "No Football Player Left Behind" spirit if not a law.
8/10