Unsentimental Look At a Town, a Team and a Dream

Rating: 9/10 (19 February 2007)

Very, very strong movie about a small town in Texas obsessed with its high school football team. With its hand-held camera shooting, it has a documentary "feel" that is appropriate for its unsentimental look at the price the players and coach pay for their town's unrelenting support/pressure--they are simply *expected* to win the state championship. Billy Bob Thornton gives a well-textured, understated performance as the coach who is paid more than the principal, but comes home to "For sale" signs on his lawn after a loss. Derek Luke breaks your heart as Boobie Miles, the player who is key to the championship season, but who suffers a serious knee injury in the first game, and is out for the season. The scene where he finally allows himself to confront his bleak future--he can only play football and has literally no other skills whatsoever, indeed he can hardly read--is devastating. In fact the entire ensemble is excellent; very strong actors even in small parts. My one criticism is that FNL has a fairly sexist outlook--the movie is about the whole town, not just the team, and it's very telling that the only two scenes with girls are ones where they're throwing themselves at the players without seeming to want anything more than sex with them. The book was much more rounded in that respect, and talked about how much pressure the cheerleaders felt to "support" their players, and make cookies, etc. for them, and I wish the movie had included that. That one criticism aside, it's an excellent movie--highly recommended.