People in West Texas are crazy about high school football -and maybe just plain crazy.
That is the premise behind Friday Night Lights
a film that recreates the 1988 Permian High School football season.
Permian, located in Odessa, Texas, is led by Coach Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton). From the film's outset, the Permian Panthers -known around Odessa as the Mojo -are under intense scrutiny from seemingly everyone in town.
The team is projected to ride senior running back James Boobie Miles (Derek Luke) to the state championship.
The town's obsession with the team turns the players into local celebrities, more like collegiate or even professional athletes than mere high school students. Some, such as Miles, embrace the celebrity status. Others wither under the pressure.
At one point, a local runs into Coach Gaines in the supermarket parking lot and, in the course of conversation, demands, Just win state.
Becoming fed up with the people of Odessa, Gaines replies, Or what? leaving the fan stuttering in disbelief as he absorbs the joust of real-world perspective.
Meanwhile, poker-faced quarterback Mike Winchell (Lucas Black) is trying to earn a college scholarship while worrying about his homebound mother, who is all too eager for him to sign up at just about any school that will pay.
Then there's Don Billingsley (Garrett Hedlund), son of former Panther Charles Billingsley, played by Tim McGraw in a stunning performance. Don can't seem to hang on to the football, and his dad can't seem to put down the bottle. The elder Billingsley's abusive relationship with his son is just one example of the film's strength as well as its fatal flaw.
Each of the main characters faces a number of crises over the course of the season, and every one of these story lines is compelling. The problem is none of these stories, except maybe that of Boobie Miles and his uncle L.V. Miles, is developed to a satisfactory extent.
Director Peter Berg's film is based on his cousin Buzz Bissinger's book. The novel format might benefit the story, allowing us to examine each character more closely and to illustrate even better the scrutiny the Panthers dealt with.
Then again, the people of Odessa provide enough intensity during two hours to cause viewers to squirm uncomfortably on behalf of the players. Perhaps a few hundred pages of that kind of pressure would be too much to take.
Friday Night Lights looks and feels like a documentary, which adds to the realization that the life of a town orbiting pathetically around a high school football team is reality for some people. The film is a believable take on a cultural phenomenon, and it will captivate despite leaving too much out of the story. 17
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Chris Deville
