'Friday Night Lights' scores a touchdown for fans of football films

By Jack Garner
Gannett News Service

FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS (PG-13) Three-and-a-Half Stars (Good-to-Excellent) The passions surrounding high school football are aptly displayed in this fabulous true-life portrait of the sport as it's practiced in the state of Texas —and many other places. Billy Bob Thornton plays the real-life coach in Peter Berg's film adaptation. Universal, 117 minutes.

The passions surrounding high school football are aptly displayed in "Friday Night Lights," a fabulous true-life portrait of the sport as it's practiced in the state of Texas — and many other places.

Billy Bob Thornton stars as Coach Gary Gaines in Peter Berg's rich adaptation of H.G. Bissinger's award-winning nonfiction book, which Sports Illustrated has labeled the best book ever written about the sport. The book and film follows the 1988 season of the Permian Panthers of Odessa, Texas.

From the film's opening shot — an endless, dusty, windblown landscape — you know you're in an area where hearty diversions are absolutely essential. And the long-time diversion in Odessa has been the Panther games under the Friday Night lights of autumn, where 20,000 fans gather in the biggest high school stadium in the country. By 1988, when this film is set, the Panthers had won five state championships in 30 years. To not play in a state championship game would put a frightening gloom over the town — and the coach's job in jeopardy.

As the season opens, the Panthers are sitting pretty. After all, they simply hand the ball off to Boobie Miles (Derek Luke of "Antwone Fisher"); a stunning senior running back with offers from dozens of prominent Division I colleges. However, early in the season, Miles goes down with a devastating knee injury, threatening his career and the Panther season.

Still, winning is what is expected, and Coach Gaines and his team have to improvise new ways to win without their star player.

After the season develops, we get to know more of the players, which empower the film with unexpected emotion and further involves the filmgoers.

Mike Winchell is the insecure and underachieving quarterback who is now forced to become a leader. The maturing Lucas Black, who once was the little boy rescued by Thornton's memorable character in "Sling Blade", plays him with a lot of heart.) And Don Billingsley (Garrett Hedlund) is a receiver-running back whose tendency to fumble is triggered by the inordinate pressure he regularly receives from his abusive father (played impressively by singer-turned-actor Tim McGraw).

Under Berg's direction, "Friday Night Lights" delivers first-rate football action, including literally about a hundred realistically recreated plays from several key games. (Only the hyped-up sound is unreal. When two high schoolers collide it doesn't always sound like a head-on wreck of two 18-wheelers.) The uplifting aspects of "Friday Night Lights" will remind filmgoers of "Hoosiers," another superb tale of small-town sports glory. "Friday Night Lights," though, doesn't romanticize its passions. It isn't afraid to display the degrading and demeaning aspects of out of control pressures — the way former players live their "glory days" through their sons and town fathers view victory as a birthright.

Still, the town's constant push for gridiron perfection is made a bit more humane by Coach Gaines in a key half-time speech, when he defines the ultimate victory: "Being perfect is about being able to look your friends in the eye and know that you didn't let them down."

Rated PG-13, profanity, drinking, implied sex.