Movie Review: Friday Night Lights

Friday Night Lights was originally a 1990 book by award winning reporter H.G. Bissinger. He spent 1988 in Odessa, Texas and describes the town's obession with their high school football team, the Permian Panthers, the winningest team in Texas history. It's not a flattering picture. Odessa is in the west Texas desert and there's little there other than oil. Economically it's tied to the boom/bust cycles of the oil industry and the boom in the 70s and 80s left a 19,000-seat astroturf football stadium costing $5.6 million. Everything in Odessa revolved around football and nothing else. After high school, players lives were over, always looking back on their prime.

A two hour movie can't do the same thing as a 400 page book. The film concentrates not so much on the town or the players but on football games. We see a lot of them, well really a lot of plays, or rather glimpses of plays. The editing is all modern ADD-style, I don't think any play is shown without a cut or ten. Most of the sentences are fragments, cut together to give the sense of what's going on. And of course it all comes down to the last play of the season in the championship game (though some liberties are taken with the true story).

We get a little background on some of the players but not much, just enough to paint their roles in story. We see the player who fumbles during practice and his father, a former player, comes down on the field to chew him out and hit him. Later on we see more of him with his father and hear him say that after high school it's all babies and memories. We see star tailback Boobie Miles tear an ACL in the first game and go through denial until breaking down with his uncle in a car crying that he can't do anything but play football. Billy Bob Thornton does a good job as head coach Gary Gaines who has the pressure to deliver a state championship, because anything else is failure and he's reminded of it everywhere he goes in town, all season long.

While the editing and lack of depth would normally bother me, mostly I liked this film. Somehow the style suggests the point, that there's nothing other than football in this town. It's just that the book is better.