Friday Night Lights
—Review by Kevin Miller
—Review by Darrel Manson
—Review by Matthew Hill
—Trailers, Photos
—About this Film pdf file
—Spiritual Connections
My thoughts on Friday Night Lights should be seen as an addition to Kevin’s review, although I think he liked it a little better than I. I think it’s very good, but not great. Perhaps my sojourn in West Texas many years ago (where I officiated at high school football games) colors my thinking a bit.
The film wants to portray Permian High as a small town school trying to outdo the big city schools. In fact, Odessa?with a population just under 10,000?isn't really a small town, and it’s certainly not a small town by West Texas standards. We should also understand that Permian is a football factory in a state that values football. Class AAAAA schools are all large schools, and Permian is usually among the top schools in the division. A sign on the stadium notes the state championships the school has already won. This is one of the factors that adds to the pressure on the players that Kevin notes. To play for Permian carries with it an expectation of greatness. It’s very easy to fail to meet those expectations.
The pressure to perform, as Kevin points out, is a central part of the story. That focus threatens to overwhelm the story at times, and early on I thought the plot might degenerate into a story about these poor young men with all this pressure. But slowly the film moves on to showing the way out?the search for Coach Gaine’s “perfection.�
One of the ways this is carried off is seen in the character of Charley Billingsley (a very nice performance by Tim McGraw.) Charley is the drunken, abusive father of Don Billingsley. Charley was part of one of the state championship teams in Permian’s past. He goes off on his son for any mistake, even a fumble on the first day of practice. His abuse grows until a scene when we see that Charley feels pressures of his own?to raise Don to be a man, even if Charley has a skewed idea of what that means. He is failing at it. We, and I think Charley, come to see that his success will not come through Don living up to whatever Charley’s dreams are, but in Charley seeing his son as the man he has become. This, too, is an example of the “perfection� that is more important than winning.
2 Comments:
i just watched this movie. great movie. probably in the top five of all time sports movies.
one thing disturbed me though:
i'm trying to divine the point of the black coach and white coach arguing over the race(s) of the referees. an all white referree crew or an all black one. a compromise is struck.
then the game seeming to turn on one or two controversial plays called by the black ref in favor of the black team.
an interesting message Hollywood seems to be sending.
About those controversial plays that were reffed by the black refs, the movie was trying to portray the racism in the sport and town that the original book hinted at. Since the final showdown was fictional anyway (they lost in the semi - finals to carter) they had to show it some other way I guess.
Best sports movie so far ! (Except for Slapshot).
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