I have long heard, and many Texans I have met have confirmed this as true, that in parts of Texas, the people there really love high school football. Given the size of the state and how spread apart many communities are, big league professional sports or even a good college team probably aren’t an option, so the local high school’s football team becomes what everyone in town follows.
The movie Friday Night Lights, basis for a TV show I have never seen and based itself on a book I haven’t read, follows the real-life example of that in Odessa, Texas. Sports in general aren’t my thing, but a good movie is a good movie, so why not see if this one is any good?
The Permian High School Panthers have a real shot at winning the state championship thanks to a good roster of seniors and under the leadership of Coach Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thorton). Coach Gaines talks a lot about perfection and winning, but even from the start, there’s a feeling that Coach Gaines may be one of the few people in town who, as much as he wants the team to win, isn’t outright obsessed with the team’s success as everyone else. The film follows Gaines and some of his players around, particularly when the star running back, and the team’s best hope for victory, goes down with a cartilage tear and can’t play.
From there, the movie follows the players with their problems on and off the field and Gaines as they make their way through the season. But this is a town that really lives and dies by its high school football team, emptying out all of the local businesses on Friday nights to go see the Panthers play. What may be the most shocking, however, is the movie’s conclusion is not about whether or not the Panthers win the state championship. That game is in there, but the real ending is how the players themselves end the season, particularly as Gaines notes during his big halftime speech that many of these kids have played the game of football for ten years and after this one game probably won’t be playing it ever again. He isn’t wrong. The closing moments of the movie show captions saying where the players went after high school, and few of them played any college ball at all, and none went professional afterwards.
Director Peter Berg does a fairly good job with his MTV quick cuts style of making the games exciting, and Thorton plays Gaines in a rather quiet way. The players are a likable bunch for the most part, kids who are maybe not that comfortable being treated as their small town’s only outlet for success and escapism. But when I think of how the movie plays it all out, I think of Gaines’s halftime speech, where the lesson isn’t that perfection means winning but simply doing the best they can in order to be able to look themselves in the mirror and do right by their teammates. That’s a good message.
It’s an especially good message given how the town of Odessa itself is portrayed. People unironically comment on how much pressure there is on 17 year old’s shoulders to perform well on the gridiron or how a large grant meant for the school was spent on the stadium, under the belief that building what looks like a professional sports arena for the high school somehow benefits the high school. It comes across as unhealthy in places while the Gaines family is a bit different. Gaines does love the sport, does everything a good coach should do, and his wife supports him, but at the same time, there’s a sense that they understand that for all that it is an important part of their lives, it’s still just a game in the end, and maybe there shouldn’t be so much pressure put on a bunch of teenagers. Or, at least, that’s how I read the movie.
Grade: B
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