| redbrian |
10-08-2004 08:32 AM |
Cast of ‘Friday Night Lights' scores small-town goals
By ROBERT W. BUTLER
The Kansas City Star
“Friday Night Lights” unfolds in drab Odessa, Texas, where everybody's self-worth is wrapped up in the failure or success of the Permian High School Panthers football team.
Based on Buzz Bissinger's 1990 nonfiction best seller, this new film from director Peter Berg is both a sports movie and an anti-sports movie. It has plenty of hard-hitting action; the Panthers' '88 season was a roller-coaster ride of triumphs and crippling setbacks that led finally to a showdown for the state championship.
But Berg and screenwriter David Aaron Cohen are gunning for more than the usual football clichés. Yes, it's about the men who play and coach the game. But it's also about the borderline lunacy that reigns in a town where a winning gridiron squad provides the citizens with their only bragging rights. At Permian, young men realize that only triumph on the playing field will get them out of this smothering place.
Fans of the book will find the film astoundingly faithful, even to the point of eschewing the dramatic flourishes and Hollywood moments we've come to expect from the genre. “Friday Night Lights” often feels more like a documentary than a standard-issue studio release, with everything from the visuals (handheld cameras capturing the washed-out look of the Mexican sequences in “Traffic”) to the pacing and the performances suggesting that we're eavesdropping on real life.
Exhibiting a light touch with material that in clumsier hands might come off as ham-handed, Berg and his players deliver a movie that feels genuinely lived in.
While the film doesn't emphasize any one central character, three figures emerge as major players.
First, there's Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton), now in his second year at Permian and just beginning to realize what it means to coach in a football-obsessed small town.
On the plus side, he earns more money than the school principal and plays in a state-of-the-art stadium (with a working oil well in the parking lot, no less). He works in a fishbowl (crowds turn out just for after-school practice); city fathers drop by Gaines' office to second-guess him; and after a loss he finds his front yard decorated with dozens of “For Sale” signs.
Movie football coaches usually come off like fire-breathing fundamentalist preachers. Thornton goes in just the opposite direction: His Gaines is perhaps the sanest person on screen. Oh, he's capable of yelling at an errant player and of giving a world-class halftime pep talk to his discouraged team, but mostly he keeps his thoughts to himself.
That's OK. Thornton is such a good actor you can tell what he's thinking without dialogue.
Lucas Black (who as a child played opposite Thornton in “Sling Blade”) is terrific as the team's quarterback, Mike Winchell. Far from being a cocky BMOC, Mike is a quiet, sensitive kid who loves the game but not the pressure and whose emotionally fragile single mom is always about two pills away from institutionalization. He's a sober young man who rarely smiles and is so naïve that he's not sure what to do when a sexually predaceous girl targets him as a trophy.
Winchell's polar opposite is Boobie Miles (Derek Luke), a running back so talented that pundits already are predicting a Heisman in his future. But with his awesome skills comes an attitude — Boobie struts and poses, seeing himself as the star of his own movie.
When challenged about slacking off on his weight training, Boobie flashes his million-dollar smile, points to his own gorgeous body, and replies: “This is God-given. All I gotta do is show up.”
Were Boobie a scholar (which he isn't; Permian's teachers apparently give him and the other players a free ride) he would know that in Greek tragedy the sin of hubris never goes unpunished.
Along the way are some solid supporting performances: Jay Hernandez as the one team member who can get out of town on his good grades and Lee Thompson Young as a bench warmer who discovers his hidden talents.
Especially telling is the relationship between Don Billingsley (Garrett Hedlund), a working-class kid, and his brutal, boozy father (country music star Tim McGraw in a solid debut). Don's old man is a sports dad from hell who played on Permian's championship team 20 years earlier and isn't above publicly punching out his son for fumbling the ball.
Heavy stuff. But Berg and Cohen also know how to deftly dish out the satire. Like the caller to the local radio sports show who has a simple explanation for why the Panthers lost a game: “They're doin' too much learnin' in that school.”
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