Friday Night Lights
Whenever I ask people whether they have seen Friday Night Lights, the warm, excited reaction I usually receive is often misguided. They think I’m talking about the TV show that made a five-year run on NBC, the one that sealed Kyle Chandler’s status as a cult hero and filled hearts across the nation. But I’m not. To be fair, I’ve never seen the show, though I have always heard great things; I’m sure I will binge-watch it eventually. But what I mean when I say Friday Night Lights is the 2004 movie, the one I saw innumerable times in my childhood because my brother couldn’t get enough of it, the one that, to this day, I believe is one of the greatest sports movies ever made.
The film’s 10th anniversary comes when the sport it so beautifully portrays — hard-hitting, old-fashioned football — is in shambles. The National Football League’s current image is a collection of monsters, men who feel free do whatever they please off the field while still making millions upon millions of dollars on it. What began with the Ray Rice elevator incident has snowballed into a media firestorm that seems to produce a new villain every day as reporters search for the dirt behind every name, like gold prospectors in the Old West.
As the multibillion-dollar face of the sport, the NFL has tarnished the view of football in general, from the peewee leagues on up. And it’s not just domestic issues in the spotlight. Player safety, corporate greed and political incorrectness have plagued the entity that once stood atop the kingdom of American athletic entertainment. Every football game seems to be seen by half of America as two groups of egotistical males seeing who can kill the other more quickly.
Peter Berg’s film adaptation of the 1990 nonfiction best-seller Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream follows the 1988 Permian High School football team in Odessa, Texas, as it makes a run for the state title. It’s a simple story about people and football. Team star running back Boobie Miles, played by Derek Luke (Sight Unseen), is a character who can’t soon be forgotten after a single viewing — a perfect mix of childish enthusiasm, limitless confidence and unbridled dreams. His strong performance is matched by Billy Bob Thornton (The Judge) as head coach Gary Gaines and Garrett Hedlund (Lullaby) as tailback Don Billingsley, in addition to an all-around great supporting cast.
In addition to the acting, the film is one of the most aesthetically pleasing sports films ever made, with crisp cinematography and a wide variety of creative shots. A masterful blend of quick cuts, aerial views and just the right mix of audio does a fine job at grabbing hold of something that seems impossible to capture on film: the essence of football in all its movement, contacts and physical subtleties.
Many sports movies either spend all their effort trying to capture the emotion off the field so that when it comes time to show a game, the camera work and direction are lacking — or vice versa. Friday Night Lights is a rare breed of movie that can do both. It can make you cry with a single 30-second scene in a high school parking lot and then get you out of your seat with dynamic game coverage 10 minutes later.
One of the strongest symbols in the film is Permian High School’s state-of-the-art football field. It’s the size of many small college stadiums and gets a packed crowd every game. It symbolizes the passion for high school football that exists throughout Texas and the money people pour into that passion to keep it alive. At one point in the film, an announcer calls the stadium a “monument to football,” and that’s exactly how I think of the movie itself. It’s a monument to the people who work all week to watch their children play on Friday nights or who still thrive on the memory of playing under those lights. Friday Night Lights is a monument to football the game, not football the image or football the defendant.
Ten years after its release, Friday Night Lights is worth a viewing, if only to remind you how deep, basic, youthful love of football looks and feels.
