High school football as a glorious religion

Rating: 8/10 (5 April 2006)

(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon.)
For an appreciation of this excellent film see the beautifully written review by D. Mikels. What I want to do here is present a counterpoint. I played high school football too and might have sat on the bench a little less except that I was a slow-footed T-quarterback at a school that ran the single wing. Yes, it was that long ago.
The football presented in this film by director Peter Berg is a little different. In fact it is a whole lot different. Here high school football is the most important thing in the world, not just for the players and coaches, but for the entire town. If you drive through a west Texas town or an Oklahoma or even an Indiana town on a Friday night in the fall, the town will be deserted (as in the movie) while the stadium at the high school will be lit up like a gigantic Christian revival meeting in which it might be fully expected that Christ will appear to perform the Second Coming.
It is no exaggeration to say that in the heartland of America the rites and rituals of football, joined into by almost the entire populous, take on all the trappings of a most zealous and evangelical religion. What Peter Berg has done here is capture that maniacal devotion and idolatry--that oh, so American way of life in a quasi-realistic way.
I say "quasi" because there is some license taken with reality by the film makers. First of all, and most importantly, the players are too old. Derek Luke, who plays star running back Boobie Miles (and does an outstanding job), was 29 when the movie was filmed. Jay Hernandez who played Chavez was 25. Anybody who really plays football or coaches it can tell you there is a world of difference between a young man of seventeen or eighteen and one of twenty-five or thirty.
And the scenes filmed especially for the movie with the flying tackles and the rolling flips and the bone-crunching open field tackles--forget it. Those are staged tackles, like kung fu fights in Chinese movies. Everything looks fantastic only it's about as realistic as a barroom fight in an old cowboy movie from the forties.
What is realistic? When sexy, saucy blonde Melissa goes looking for her trophy seduction of the MoJo quarterback--that's real. She knows that the highest status in town belongs to the star of the high school football team, and the highest status of any girl is to get that guy. Also realistic is the pressure put on coaches and administrators to win football games. Winning isn't a matter of life and death. As some coaches will tell you, it's more important than that. And they mean it. Die and you're only dead. But lose at football and you are disgraced for life. Typifying this mentality is Don Billingsley, father of running back Charles, who wants to beat the life out of his son for fumbling the football. Can't the kid see that you let down your teammates, your school, your town, your friends, your relatives and God Almighty if you fumble the f-ing football? Also real is Boobie Miles's answer to what subject he gets all A's in: "There's only one subject. That's football." Or this line from a disappointed fan calling in to the local radio jock show after the team loses a game: "There's too much learning going on at that school." He's not kidding. He means it. Too much time in the classroom. Too little on the field.
So is this film--as its devoted fans believe and know to be true--an ode to the glory and beauty of football? Think again, jockstrap. It's a glorification. It represents a mentality in which the greatest events of life occur when you're eighteen years old. After that it's all over. What you got left is beer, the wife, TV, and Bruce Springsteen's "Glory Days." Or to choose another lyric, what you've got are "Veterans of the fight/Fast asleep at the traffic light." (Jackson Browne) There are a number of goofs and anachronisms in the movie. IMDb lists a dozen or so including cars in the parking lots that weren't even made in 1988, the year of the film, and football gear used that didn't exist then. But that doesn't matter, and nobody who loves this film cares in the slightest about that because what really counts is the fantasy, the imagined and recalled glory of a time when everything was new and astonishingly vivid, when events made indelible marks on our hearts and souls. When we were all 17. This then is mythology in the making and in the living.
The question begs itself: is this good or is this bad? Is football as a religion something to be treasured or condemned? Personally I have mixed feelings. Young men have aggressive tendencies that need to be channeled and middle-aged men need to play war games. Football allows an acting out of these needs without undue harm to anyone. Certainly football is better than gang-banging.
When, some many years down the road, the history of cinema is brought up to date, this film will be remembered because it is a very good film, and Billy Bob Thornton's fine performance as Coach Gary Grimes will be appreciated. But instead of the film being seen as a realistic portrayal of what it's like to play and be involved in high school football, it will be seen as a commentary on the sociology of middle America in the late 20th century, a time when the nation was very rich and football was not only king but something close to a way of life, something indistinguishable from a national religion.