Friday Night Lite - but enjoyable anyway

Rating: 6/10 (19 October 2005)

The best thing about "Friday Night Lights" is how it exposes the small town obsession with high school football. In Odessa, Texas, where the story is set, businesses shut down and radio sports commentators opine with the pretentious air of political pundits when the Permian Panthers take to the field. Now this is some serious football country, as the mood of the town fluctuates with the win/loss record of the team and family dynamics follow along with the ebb and flow of the season. It may be that somebody down there in Odessa just seriously needs to get a life.
Based on the book by H.G. Bissinger, the film recounts the 1988 season when Coach Gary Gaines, despite the loss of his best player, still managed to carry his team to the state championships.
Unfortunately, the storyline and characters in the film are not always as interesting as the setting and milieu. The drama is occasionally lacking and many of the characters rank as little more than hoary sports movie clichés: the supportive coach's wife; the abusive, alcoholic father trying to relive his high school glory days through his son; the cocky star player humbled by the exigencies of a cruel fate. Yet, the film has assets that help it to overcome some of the weaknesses of the script. Billy Bob Thornton plays Gaines as a thoughtful, even-tempered individual who knows what it takes to win but understands that life does not begin and end on the football field. His inspirational locker room speech towards the close is restrained, pointed and well delivered. In fact, the coach seems far less obsessed with winning than many of the ordinary folks he runs into - and has to take unsolicited advice from - on a daily basis. It is that pressure to win at all costs - placed not only on the boys but on the coach as well - that the movie dramatizes so effectively. The film also makes it clear that, for many of these boys, football is the only ticket they will ever have out of small town America.
"Friday Night Lights" isn't nearly as compelling and involving as "Remember the Titans," but die-hard football fans won't be complaining.
POSTSCRIPT (2014). Little did I imagine at the time I wrote this review that "Friday Night Lights" would one day become my favorite TV series of all time.