Friday Night Lights: 9/10

Rating: 9/10 (9 October 2004)

In February, I saw a sports movie called Miracle. I didn't like it one bit. It was basically a clichÃ©d, rah-rah-rah-go-America sports movie, with no purpose in it. With obvious reasons, Friday Night Lights will be compared to it. But there's a huge difference here. One's good, one isn't. Plain and simple like that. Every fault that was in Miracle is not evident in Friday Night Lights. Miracle focused in on the coach, yet tried to focus in on a few players, too. The result was a muddled mess, while here in Friday Night Lights, there is no central character, allowing the story to go in so many more directions.
In the small, poverty-stricken town of Odessa, Texas, all the residents have is their local high-school football team. The oft-state championship-winning team, headed by Coach Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton), is going for another state title, thanks to their big star Boobie Miles (Derek Luke). But the team goes through injuries, hardships, and others, as the whole city is counting on them to win the states again.
What makes Friday Night Lights so great is director Peter Berg. Most importantly, he takes a team that requires no sympathy whatsoever-they're state champions-and yet makes us root for them. How he does this, I'm not sure, but it's an amazing feat to accomplish. Also, a hand-held camera is used with great effect. It reminded me of Man on Fire used its camera. It kept on moving around and around, not being able to be still for a second, but here, it actually worked. It wasn't obtrusive, and it looked like it belonged. It wasn't nauseating at all. The camera also had a few "novelty" shots, as I'll call them, which are overhead shots, crane shots, etc., which worked will in the story and the movie.
What may be even better than the directing is the writing by David Aaron Cohen (based off of Buzz Bissinger's book). It may seem like a simple script at first, but then you can't place your finger on why you liked the movie so much. It's because the movie works amazingly well as basically a series of vignettes. Most scenes are short, or overlap each other, and at first seem to be pretty random, but they all fit together and make a coherent storyline. And then you realize that this is no ordinary football film. There's a bit of the slow-motion action shots, sure, and some inspirational music swelling up. But there's no central character, therefore, we can't say that the script deviated from the main character, which means that development would be lacking. We didn't find out as much as we could about these characters, but we found out enough. It's amazing how well a movie like this could work with stock characters, too. There's the kid living with a single mother, a kid with an abusive dad, and all of the above. Friday Night Lights focuses in on a few characters, lets us get to know them, and really works. We find out that we care about all of these characters, they're not larger than life or anything.
Thornton was pretty good, but he's not the world's best actor, so we can't expect that much. The best, though is Derek Luke as Boobie. His performance is credible, and after coming off the mess that was Antwone Fisher, he redeems himself here. Friday Night Lights is hard to talk about in words, but it's a purely cinematic experience, one that you must see even if you hate sports movies.
My rating: 9/10
Rated PG-13 for thematic issues, sexual content, language, some teen drinking and rough sports action.