"Friday Night Lights"

Billy Bob Thornton, as the coach of a small-town high school football team, scores a few points, but this smug little film drops the ball at every turn.

By Charles Taylor

Oct 8, 2004 | In "Friday Night Lights," high school football isn't so much enthusiasm or even obsession as shared psychosis. I don't know how this material was presented in the H.G. Bissinger nonfiction book that is the source for the new movie, but in the film's first half, director Peter Berg, who co-wrote the script with David Aaron Cohen, presents football mania in tiny Odessa, Texas, as the embodiment of American win-at-all-costs mentality.

The town has diverted money from the school to build a stadium for its local team, and the new coach (Billy Bob Thornton) is paid more than the school principal. The kids on the team can't go out for a hamburger without someone coming up to tell them they can't let the town down in the approaching season, or pull into a convenience store without the town sheriff making them promise they will not only win the state championship but win every game they play. The new coach can't do paperwork without a cadre of town businessman breaking into his office to discuss defense, or go to the supermarket without getting more of the same.

There's an ugly undercurrent of violence to all these exhortations, a promise that failure will not be tolerated. When one of the players fumbles during practice, his dad (country singer Tim McGraw, looking like Michael Madsen's baby brother), who was on the team in one of the years that it won a state championship, strides onto the field to knock his son down in disgust. When the team loses a game, the coach returns home to find local realtors have placed "For Sale" signs on his lawn.

Berg doesn't even allow us the pleasure of the game itself. Football here is just the sort of red-meat spectacle the rednecks and blowhards he's put on-screen would thrill to -- the sight of young men ground into fertilizer. When the players collide on the field, the soundtrack emits a Dolby-amplified whammy of crashing bodies and crunching bones.

The camera is shoved in the middle of the skirmishes. We see teenage boys running into outstretched arms as if they slammed into tree branches, or plucked from a midair leap by an opposing player and slammed to the ground. One kid, lying on the ground after being tackled, has his helmet kicked into his teeth.

Some of the football sequences look exciting, but they're so chopped up you see them only in flashes. And in the big championship game, with the clock running and the players trying to keep getting first downs until they score, the camera is so close in that you can't even tell what yard line they're on.

The players here are presented less as athletes than as soldiers whose sacrifices are understood to be no more than is expected of them. After one lost game, a caller to the local radio station says that maybe the kids are learning too much in school to concentrate on the game. Football may hold a future for some of these kids, like Boobie (Derek Luke), the star player being scouted by the big colleges who can barely read the USC catalog he's been sent. But for most of them, their senior season will be their one moment of glory before a life spent working at the lousy jobs their lousy education has prepared them for.

At some point in the making of "Friday Night Lights," either Berg or the studio, Universal, must have realized nobody was going to pay money to see a movie about that. So in the second half, the movie turns into a rah-rah celebration of exactly the mind-set it's spent the first half criticizing. All of the bad things that have resulted from the characters' mindless devotion to gridiron glory -- the abusive father who stays drunk to forget that the peak of his life came at 17; the barely educated Boobie's having nothing left in his life when a knee injury ends his dream of playing pro -- are converted into obstacles that test the mettle of the young warriors.

Next Page: Teamwork and persistence are great things to learn, but there are more important uses for them than a frickin' football game

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