As someone who likes to watch high school football games under the lights on Friday nights, there was no way I was going to pass up a chance to watch a movie called "Friday Night Lights." That said, I went to the theater ready to be underwhelmed.
Given the track record of sports movies, I expected the worst — please, (don't) see "The Replacements," "Any Given Sunday," etc. I was ready for (a) melodrama ("Any Given Sunday"), (b) over-the-top, unauthentic game action ("Remember the Titans," "Jerry Maguire," etc.), (c) full knowledge of the outcome of the climactic game (see almost any sports film), (d) actors who look and move as if they had never stepped on an athletic field in their lives (Keanu Reeves in "The Replacements" comes to mind) and (e) tackles that look and sound like the players were shot out of a cannon ("Remember the Titans," etc.).
To my surprise, I got none of the above except e.
What I got instead was one of the best sports films ever made, and certainly one of the best football movies, better even than the good ones — "Remember the Titans," and "Jerry Maguire."
"Friday Night Lights" is based on a book by the same name that tells the story of the 1988 Permian High School football team in football-crazy Texas. As portrayed in the film, the town of Odessa is a place where winning is more important than a kid's knee, where women use words like "trips" and "Z receiver" in normal conversation, where a state ring is a rite of passage, where businesses post signs that say "Closed gone to game," where boosters visit the coach en masse to suggest some tweaks for the cover 2 defense, where fans ask the quarterback to pose for pictures holding their baby, where the coach earns more money than the principal, where school is considered a distraction for football, not vice versa.
Meanwhile, their boy-players are sad, broken and lost, and football is anything but fun.
The movie delivers all the usual elements of a sports movie — an intense coach, parents living through their kids, a big game, huge odds, meddling parents — but for once they did it right. For once, they didn't make the football coach a completely evil madman. He is driven and given to bouts of screaming, but he has redeeming qualities.
Similarly, the father who is living through his son — in this case, played remarkably well by country singer Tim McGraw — eventually reveals a softer side. For once, the audience is not sure if the hometown team is going to win the climactic game (I'm not saying this means they lose or win; I'm saying you just don't know what will happen, the way you did in "Titans" and "The Natural" and "Hoosiers" and almost any other sports flick you can name).
This movie delivers some great lines and characters. Billy Bob Thornton, the head coach, delivers one of the better halftime speeches you'll see on the screen, and throughout the movie he delivers some memorable lines: "There's not much difference between winning and losing except the way the outside world treats you," he says. McGraw, the sad, raging father who was a legendary player in his day, tells his son, who can't measure up on the gridiron, "You're not gettin' it. It's the only thing you're gonna have. It carries you forever. It's an ugly fact of life. You got one stinkin' year to make some memories."
The other thing the movie delivers is realistic action on the field. You'll wonder how they pulled it off, without taking clips from actual games (which they didn't). The only flaw is the tackles, which, like punches from Rocky's gloves and the hits in "Titans," sound like detonations. If there were this many hard hits in a game, there would be more fatalities and decapitations than ACL tears.
In the end, the story comes together nicely, but it will leave you with mixed feelings about high school football taken this seriously and obsessively. The smile in the final scene says it all — and that's sad.
E-mail: drob@desnews.com