Fantastic portrait of small town hell

Rating: Null/10 (23 February 2006)

Small town life has always seemed rather miserable to me. The idealist would envisage it as a world of cookies and apple pie, of family values and kids playing softball. And this Shangri-La of hotdogs and cheeseburgers would be inhabited by golly-gee good-hearted folk, folk who look after their neighbours when they have cardiac arrest after their hearts swell with too much joy and love of life. And in each corner there would be a jock with a large chest and a cheerleader with a rack to match. But the reality has always seemed rather different. I can imagine a world full of losers and alcoholics, of broken dreams and smashed faces. Small town life isn't a piece of heaven. It's a piece of hell.
And so it is in Friday Night Lights. Here you have a town that defines itself entirely by football. Education and culture be damned.
The lack of interest in education is superbly illustrated in a series of calls on a radio show. They talk about the money that was spent on the football stadium. "They say some of that money should have gone to the school." "Aint that stadium part of the school?" And then during game day the entire town empties. Everywhere you go you see signs saying, "Gone to game." The entire town invests its dreams and hopes in this football team and in the kids that play in it. It's a pathetic state of affairs.
Of course this means that the kids that play are put under an extraordinary amount of pressure  pressure that they should never have to face so early on in their lives. Some react by internalising (Mike, the quarterback, rarely raises a smile) and some let it go to their heads (Boobie, the team's star player, is all mouth and swagger). But the frailty of this sort of existence is magnificently emphasised by the aforementioned Boobie. Right from the start you know his card is marked. He's cocky, he's talented and he says that his talent is god given. Therefore you know he's going to get injured. And his injury comes in the first game after he's forced into the match because a player loses his helmet. He should never have been on the field but suddenly his bright career is under threat. At the beginning it's kind of hard to find sympathy for the lad  there's a feeling of just desserts  but when the mask drops and he's reduced to a blubbering wreck because he'll never play football again, your heart goes out to him. Football was the one joy he had. It was the one thing he could excel in and it was his ticket out of this miserable town. But then out of nowhere it's taken away from him. And his future is bleakly summed up in one shot. He sits on the porch and he sees a bunch of garbage men. Not only is he now on the scrap heap but that's the sort of job he has to look forward to. He goes from having the world at his feet to being the rubbish that is scraped off the pavement.
Also under pressure is the coach. Everywhere he goes people give him advice. And then people slag him off on the radio and people even threaten him when the possibility of defeat is raised. If the team loses, the town loses. The absurdity of this is best depicted in a scene where the team is forced into a tie-breaker and their future is decided by the flip of a coin. The whole town watches this on TV! This is what gives their life purpose and meaning. And it's amusing (and sad at the same time) that the coach gets paid more than the school principal. The small town people here have no faith in bettering themselves through education and knowledge. In Odessa betterment is measured by how many balls you catch, how many yards you rush and how many heads you bash.
And the football here is superbly filmed. All the excitement is captured as well as all the crunching tackles (Boobie's injury is nasty, but I actually winced more when the quarterback gets his helmet kicked in his face). But I do have to say that I was disappointed when a bit of schmaltz found its way into the film in the final game. "I love you all," the teary quarterback says before the final play. But thankfully it's only a small moment and thankfully the actual end of the game is a pleasant surprise, one that goes against the grain of most sports movies.
But then again, the film isn't really a sports movie as such. It's more a portrait of a town than a football team. And that's why the film works so well. It's about the desperation of having no way out. It's about the fleeting joy of actually doing something you love. And it's also about the despair that this might be as good as it gets. In the film there's an ex-football star who abuses his son. He chides him for not being good enough. But despite at first seeming like a one-dimensional alcoholic father (a character we've seen in millions of films) he reveals a misery that is all too real. He had one decent year in his life. One year that actually meant something. And from that point onwards it was downhill. He tells his son that he has one year to make some memories. It's a despairing sentiment, and one that might not apply to all the players, but for some, perhaps even most, it must ring true. Life isn't going to get any better than being a member of a high school football team. Holy crap, pass the gun.