Review of Friday Night Lights Movie Music Choice
"You have the responsibility of protecting this team and this schoolhouse and this town." -- Coach Gary Gaines
Protecting them against what? Nosotros're not talking about state of war hither, we're talking about high school football. And yet as "Friday Night Lights" unfolds, we brainstorm to understand: The office of the team is to protect against the idea that the town is inconsequential and its citizens are insignificant. If Gaines can lead the Odessa Permian team to a state championship, that will evidence that Odessa is a place of effect, a centre of power and glory. Well, won't it?
Certainly there are endless citizens in that Texas town who lead happy and productive lives and are fulfilled without depending on loftier schoolhouse football. We just don't meet whatsoever of them in the movie, which focuses on the team, the motorcoach and the local boosters -- adults who define themselves in terms of their relationship to the team. These people are obsessed beyond all reason with winning and losing, and the pressure they put on the kids and their coach is relentless. "Accept us to land, Motorcoach," one booster tells Gaines in a supermarket parking lot. "Or what?" asks Gaines. Or else. "Are nosotros going to be moving once again?" the bus's young daughter asks after a defeat. "No, honey," says her female parent, merely Gaines answers: "possibly."
Gaines is played past Billy Bob Thornton in another great performance in the past 12 months that have already supplied ii other proofs of what a skilled player he is: He played the drunken title graphic symbol in "Bad Santa," and Davy Crockett in "The Alamo." The human being has range, and he has a command of tone, too. Santa was over the peak, only his Coach Gaines is a private human being, inward, who finds it wise to keep his thoughts to himself. Consider the scene where he's told that his star player's injury won't forbid him from playing. Expect at his optics. He has reason to believe he is beingness lied to. He has reason to hope he is not. The role player is Boobie Miles (Derek Luke), a motormouth with a behemothic talent that comes wrapped in ego. When i of his teammates accused him of non working out in the weight room, he explains that his souvenir is "God-given." Merely in the first game of the season, he injures his knee. He pretends information technology's nix. Eventually, the uncle who is raising him (Grover Coulson) takes him to Midland for an MRI, which reveals a badly torn ligament. Boobie dismisses the doctor as a Midland fan "jealous of Odessa," and he and his uncle tell the coach he's gear up to play. He isn't. Because he depended on sports for his future, considering he doesn't read very well, there is a moment when he sits on the porch and watches some garbage men at work and contemplates his futurity.
The movie is based on real life, described the best seller Friday Nighttime Lights: A Town, a Team and a Dream, by H.G. Bissinger. It depicts Odessa as a boondocks consumed by high school football; its stadium is larger than those at many colleges. Local talk radio keeps up a steady drumbeat of criticism against Gaines. "They're doing likewise much learning in the schools," one caller complains.
The movie has been directed by Peter Berg not as character studies but as emotional snapshots. Nosotros catch on who the key characters are. Others are never identified. Gaines has enormous focus and can deliver a powerful message at halftime, but he understands better than anyone else that football is only a game. Unfortunately, his chore is not only a game, and and so he must take football game very seriously; his job is not to protect the town and the school, simply to protect his family. At dinner parties, in restaurants, everywhere he goes, he undergoes an endless stream of comments, criticism, suggestions, threats masked as praise. The way Thornton plays him, Gaines reminds me of Hemingway's definition of courage: grace nether force per unit area.
There is something pathetic well-nigh a grown homo still living his life in terms of high schoolhouse, and that's the example with Charles Billingsley (played with great power by the country singer Tim McGraw). He notwithstanding wears his ring from Odessa's title team of twenty years earlier and bullies his son Don (Garrett Hedlund), who is a receiver on the team. When Don fumbles early in the season, Charles actually walks onto the field to chew him out. He slaps him around, trash-talks him, gets drunk and directs a withering stream of sarcasm at the kid -- and has a revealing moment when he tells Don that loftier school football volition be the high betoken of his life.
I started in journalism at xv, every bit a sportswriter covering loftier schoolhouse football. I thought it was the about important thing on world. But information technology was more than innocent in those days. At what bespeak in American history did the phrase "Information technology'southward non whether you win or lose, only how you lot play the game" get replaced by "Winning isn't everything; it'south the only thing"? Today's teams are like surrogate nations for their fans. When your team wins, it enhances yous.
Oddly enough, despite all these undertones, "Friday Night Lights" does besides work like a traditional sports movie, and there's enormous tension and excitement at the cease, when everything comes down to the final play in the state finals. The movie demonstrates the power of sports to involve usa; nosotros don't alive in Odessa and are watching a game played 16 years ago, and we become all wound up.
"Fri Nighttime Lights" reminded me of another moving picture filmed in Westward Texas: "The Last Picture Show," set 50 years ago. In that ane, after the local team loses another game, the players catch flak everywhere they become. Information technology's gotten worse. I'll bet if you phoned talk radio in Odessa and argued that high school football game is only a game, y'all'd make a lot of people mad at you. The poor kids who play it are nether roughshod force per unit area. 1 of the team members tells a friend, midway through the season: "I only don't experience similar I'm 17."
Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.
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Friday Night Lights (2004)
118 minutes
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Source: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/friday-night-lights-2004
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