A town for sale, Odessa, Texas has seen better days--the financial bust evident in its boarded-up shops and broken lives. Yet one hope sustains the community where, once a week during the fall, the town and its dreams come alive beneath the dazzling and disorienting Friday night lights...when the Permian High Panthers take to the field. In a city where economic uncertainty has eroded the spirit of its inhabitants, nearly everyone seeks comfort in the religion of the Friday night ritual, where the unfulfilled dreams of an entire community are shifted onto the shoulder pads of a team of high-school athletes.

Friday Night Lights captures the frenzy of a small town that reveres its school team and their weekly games. With Odessa standing in for places just like it all across America, the film provides an illuminating look at the hoped-for successes and the built-in failures of trying to live the American Dream through the efforts of a group of talented young men. The film is produced by Academy Award® winner Brian Grazer, directed by Peter Berg (The Rundown, Very Bad Things) and adapted from Bissinger's book by Berg and David Aaron Cohen (The Devil's Own).

Review continued here

Despite quality in every area of filmmaking, this heavy tone turns me off to the movie—I like at least a little levity somewhere, a genuine smile here or there. But of course, all of this heaviness is intentional. If this movie is saying anything, it’s repeating the old sports movie metaphor, “life is like (insert sport here).” In this case, life is like football. So, the heaviness—the heaviness which is produced by football and which permeates the lives of the past, present, and future people of Odessa—must somehow be part of Friday Night Lights’s insight into life. So, what is that insight?

To me, the insight has to do with high expectations, and the effects they can have. This story is filled with people who are all struggling to live up to high expectations. The players on Odessa Permian’s high school football team are all aware that they must “be perfect.” They must bring home a state title, because the whole town is depending on them—and the town doesn’t have much else to depend on. The coach also, played wonderfully by Billy Bob Thornton, faces the wrath of the townsfolk (and unemployment) if he calls one bad play, let alone loses a game, or doesn’t win the championship.

But the effects of these expectations don’t stop at the locker room door. The parents and families of players feel them. The coach’s family feels them. The town as a whole feels them. By a certain point in the movie, the pressure of all of this creates a great scene of irony, where one player is asked, by a college scout, if “football is fun.” Given the context, the question if really laughable. Maybe the game was supposed to be fun, but for the characters in this movie, it really can’t be anymore.

[Spoilers Ahead]

All of these expectations build through the movie, until we’re treated to two sports movie musts: the final “big game,” and the coach’s final inspirational speech. And it is in the outcome of these two musts that this movie turns the sports movie genre on its ear, and rams home its big insight. Normally the message of a sports movie has to do with teamwork, or brotherhood, or hope, or dedication, or something, right? Not so with this movie. Normally the team wins the big game in a sports movie, right? Not so with this movie. Instead, the coach gives a speech that would make Vince Lombardi roll over in his grave. The coach says that being perfect, meeting those high expectations, doesn’t mean winning. He gives a list of things that being perfect does mean, but the point is clear: reject those unrealistic expectations. Do your best. And then, proving that the movie really does believe what it’s saying, the Odessa Permian team proceeds to lose the big game.

Now the connection can be made. Now we can see that all of the intentional heaviness is there to show, with jarring realism, what people’s lives can look like when the focus is wrong and the expectations too high. We can see that if we’re too focused on the win—in whatever form it takes in our lives—we’ll end up unhappy. If we demand that touchdown of ourselves, we’ll never be happy with just a first down, no matter how good a first down might be. Friday Night Lights is telling us that we’re not perfect, never will be, can’t be, and that we’ll be miserable if we try to be.

Still, as much as this insight is true and good . . . boy we sure want that win, don’t we? We sure long for perfection, even as we know and remind ourselves with movies like this that we can’t reach it. The perfect season. The perfect 10. The beauty and simplicity of things when they’re just right, and going exactly as they’re supposed to. Strangely, it’s as human to want perfection, as it is to know we can’t have it. And when we see that we can’t get that perfection from ourselves, we’ll look for it somewhere else. Sports is just one of the ways in which we, vicariously, try to get a little bit of that perfection in our lives. I might suck, but the (insert favorite team here) sure don’t. And when they win, I kind of win too. When my favorite player makes that superhuman play, I feel a little superhuman with him.

To me, this is all evidence of our reaching for the divine. We sense our own imperfections, stumble miserably under the weight of them, yet constantly look for perfection, even if it’s in someone else. I think, as with all our deepest longings, that there really must be a food to satisfy this hunger. Perhaps a clue to it can be found in the person who claimed to be perfect in our place. The person who claimed to live up to the highest expectations, so we don’t have to struggle under our inability to meet them. Perhaps Friday Night Lights ends up being about people needing more than just themselves, maybe someone greater!