Friday Night Lights: Football, not life
September has arrived, and the weather seems to be starting to cool down, which means that it’s finally time for some football. High schools are the first to start playing (there’s still another agonizing week before the NFL season kicks off), so this Friday is a perfect time to highlight the best football movie that I’ve ever seen. Let the games begin…
Rating: three 1/2 stars (out of four)
“When you’re famous at 18, you spend the rest of your life fading away.”
The lead character of John Grisham’s delightful novella Bleachers spoke those words, and they apply perfectly to the attitudes explored in Friday Night Lights, which concerns the same material as that book: high school football. This time, the focus is on not only the team but also the suffocating culture that surrounds it. Based on H.G. Bissinger’s book chronicling the 1988 season of the Permian Panthers of Odessa, Texas, Lights excels with traits that rarely come with football movies. Indeed, it’s hardly a sports movie at all (just like how the Bournes are much more than spy flicks) but rather a realistic, emotive, beautifully-acted film that’s about the lives of its characters. Although the yawningly overwrought description on the back cover doesn’t reflect it, the film cares about a lot more than the success of its team.
The movie is unflinching in its depiction of the town. Director Peter Berg uses washed-out colors to make the landscape look even more barren, helping us to at least partially understand why everyone you meet is so obsessed with the only thing that gives their area fame. The Panthers are the winningest high school team in Texas history, with four state championships to their name, but that matters little in the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately culture. Football is the easiest way to make someone in Odessa happy, yet because of the way the town approaches it, it collectively sucks all the joy out of it. Note the grim expression on the face of quarterback Mike Winchell (Lucas Black) when college recruiters tell him the game is supposed to be fun. Media frenzies surround the first practice of summer, and when the father of a player (played by Tim McGraw) comes out onto the field to castigate him for fumbling, people stare, but no one stops him. Eventually, a player steps in to say, “Please…it’s the first day of practice,” as if to say that such an outburst would be permissible when the team was supposed to be in mid-season form.
Most sports movies are by definition ensemble pieces, but there’s generally a hero to root for, namely the coach or quarterback. Lights is even more egalitarian—no one could be considered the star. The movie focuses mostly on third-year coach Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton), Winchell, star running back Boobie Miles (Derek Luke), and fullback Don Billingsley (Garrett Hedlund), and it almost sneaks up on you in the way it fully develops its storylines with grace and intelligence. Billinsgley, for example, has to deal with his abusive father, still living his life based on his high school glory days. When Don keeps fumbling, his father takes out the anger that stems from his dead-end life on him. But he isn’t the devil, just a misguided, alcoholic man who’s been burned out by life—who’s been fading away since 18—and assumes that the same will happen to his son after high school. McGraw subsumes himself into the role and delivers a heart-wrenching performance.
FNL simply excels in its depiction of the characters’ struggles with holding onto any measure of joy amidst the despairing situation in which they live. Black, an asset in All the Pretty Horses, effectively presents a hesitant quarterback who isn’t sure he wants to leave the town because of his mother’s ill health. Boobie, excellently played by Luke, carries not only the expectations of the town but also the burden of being the team’s centerpiece. He’s effectively lost for the season to injury in the first game, yet he and his uncle do all they can to avoid listening to doctors. There’s an emotionally stunning scene when he sits in a car after clearing out his locker and realizes that he has never planned on a life that doesn’t include football.
Thornton’s coach regards the football obsession with a bit of bemusement, as he understands that a loss isn’t the end of a pursuit of happiness. He is an atypical movie coach, neither a tough guy in the mold of Denzel Washington’s character in Remember the Titans nor a “players’ coach.” Thornton, whose performance is the epitome of controlled yet evocative acting, says more with his eyes than words, but Gaines does give the Panthers the best speech I’ve ever heard in a sports movie. At halftime of the state championship, knowing that the game represents the end of the football era of his players’ lives, he doesn’t try to make them believe they can do anything. He just says, “Put each other in your hearts forever, because forever’s about to happen out here in a few minutes.”
How refreshing it is to reach the final scenes of a sports movie and be concerned with things other than a game’s outcome. Panther wins don’t generate much emotion–they’re expected and accepted, but not experienced the way losses are. Thus, if you understand by the end that Friday Night Lights has nobler goals than most sports movies, you won’t find the conclusion surprising. And just as a critical mid-season loss leads to important conversations between Gaines and Winchell and Billingsley and his father, the climactic heartbreak allows the characters to show who they truly are. As another magnificent piece of the soundtrack (which is mostly from masterful conceptualists Explosions in the Sky and Daniel Lanois) mourns with the players and fans, Billingsley’s father walks onto the football field and completes his character’s arc, making everything that came before meaningful. And in the process, he gives us what is, without question, the strongest and most emotional moment I’ve ever seen in a sports movie–and one of the best in any, regardless of type.
Most sports movies try to lift you to the rafters based on the athletic talents of the players on screen; here is the rare one that does so based on the inherent quality of its filmmaking, based on the feelings generated by things like the last smile on Winchell’s face and the shocking postscript. A win for the Panthers is a relief, not a triumph. Friday Night Lights is the latter.