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Preview by: Jack Foley
THE creative team behind American football drama, Friday Night
Lights, are at pains to point out that their film isn't so much
a sports movie, but a drama about people.
As such, it can be enjoyed by audiences of all gender and age,
no matter where they are seeing it in the world.
Based on HG 'Buzz' Bissinger's book, Friday Night Lights:
A Town, a Team and a Dream, the film follows the fortunes
of the 1988 Permian High School football season in Odessa, Texas,
which inspired a community and made a name for their coach, Gary
Gaines (played by Billy Bob Thornton).
A town for sale, Odessa, Texas had seen better days and was marked
by boarded-up shops and broken lives.
Hope, however, was sustained by the community in the Permian
High Panthers, who took to the field every Friday night to deliver
a relief from the stresses and strains of everyday life.
In book form, Friday Night Lights remained on The New York Times
Best-seller List for 15 weeks, has since gone through several
re-printings and was named by Sports Illustrated as one of greatest
sports stories of all time.
It still sells at the rate of nearly 50,000 copies a year.
In film form, the story continues to capture the imagination
of the majority of people who see it, emerging not just as a story
of triumph against the odds, but as a tribute to the football
players, coaches, mothers, fathers, pastors, boosters, fans and
families struggling with ongoing personal conflicts.
Its star, Billy Bob Thornton, fully appreciated its relevance
to many towns in America when he was first offered the script.
"It's really a movie about the obsession with high school
football in Texas.
"I grew up in Arkansas, and this mania also exists there.
So it's about this obsession with high school football and how
it can bring a town together... or tear it apart.
"I grew up watching my dad as a high school basketball coach,"
he remembers. "When the Arkansas Razorbacks lost, my dad
was in a bad mood for two or three weeks, and it affected the
whole household.
"But what's also great about this story and Berg's movie
is that it's not just about football. It deals with the actual
people. So when you see the football games, you care about the
people playing them, because you know who they are."
Adds Bissinger, the man behind the book: "I wanted to recount
the highs and lows of what it meant to be a high school football
player in a town such as this.
"The idea of high school sports keeping a town together,
keeping it alive, and the inevitable danger of adults living vicariously
through their young, fascinated me.
"These kids held the town on their shoulders in a place
where high school football went to the very core of life."
The film opens in the UK on May 13, 2005, and is already drawing
considerable acclaim.
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US reaction
Critics in America were quick to warm to the merits of Friday
Night Lights, praising it for achieving exactly what it set out
to.
The New York Times wrote that 'Peter Berg directs
this Texas high school football extravaganza in a tough, gritty
style that gives it an unusually fine and vivid sense of place'.
While Entertainment Weekly proclaimed it to
be 'a stringent, stirring real-life drama'.
And the Washington Post opined that 'the movie
is full of both crushing disappointment and hope, resignation
and joy, ugliness and great beauty'.
Strong, too, was the Boston Globe, which pointed
out that 'there's not much in Friday Night Lights that you haven't
ever seen or couldn't have imagined. Relative to most Hollywood
sports movies, however, it just feels new'.
Variety, too, was impressed, stating that 'there's
a surge in momentum through the playoffs and into the Texas state
championship game, which occupies a quarter of the film's nearly
two-hour running time'.
While the San Francisco Chronicle predicted
that 'eople who like sports movies will love Friday Night Lights,
but so will people who don't like sports movies and would never
think of seeing a high school football game'.
Relevant, too, was the view of the Hollywood Reporter,
which wrote that 'the film lets you get caught up in the excitement
of this religion and the addictive nature of those stadium lights'.
While the Chicago Sun-Times observed that 'the
movie demonstrates the power of sports to involve us; we don't
live in Odessa and are watching a game played 16 years ago, and
we get all wound up'.
The New York Observer, meanwhile, felt that
'nuance typifies both Mr Thornton's highly calibrated performance
and the film's absence of unnecessary underlining'.
While the Los Anegeles Times wrote: "Always
slick and pumped up, Friday Night Lights is real enough around
the edges to hold our attention even if it sacrifices accuracy
for storytelling ease."
The final word, however, goes to the Miami Herald,
which concludes this round-up by declaring that Friday Night Lights
is 'a stand-up example of how effective underdog sports movies
are, no matter how many times you've seen this kind of thing before'.
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