Review of Friday Night Lights (2004) by Markb. — 11 Oct 2004

It's a good thing that James "Radio" Kennedy, the mentally challenged kid played by Cuba Gooding, Jr. in Radio, the sentimental football drama released almost exactly a year ago, hung around the high school football team in Anderson, SC rather than the Odessa, TX one depicted here.

Chances are, if he'd even come close to interrupting or disrupting a practice, the subhuman, mouth-breathing football worshippers of the town (which, according to Friday Night Lights, pretty much consists of ALL the town) would've beaten him to within a half-inch of his life and left him for dead near the exit ramp.

Exceedingly well made but profoundly (and necessarily) depressing and disturbing, Peter Berg's account of the Panthers' 1988 season comes off as so virulently anti-football and anti-football culture that it makes North Dallas Forty look like Knute Rockne, All American by comparison! Don't blame the doctor, though, for accurately diagnosing the sickness (although, come to think of it, one of the film's characters does just that!) This is a town where gridiron boosterism degenerates to Nuremberg Rally levels; where the father who gets the most screen time is a drunken, abusive cretin (courageously played by country icon Tim McGraw) who harrasses his son repeatedly and endlessly about dropping the ball--if you ever wanted to make an argument for the mandatory sterilization of unfit fathers, there's Exhibit A! Even the superficially sympathetic coach (Billy Bob Thornton, following up Bad Santa and The Alamo with his third all-time world class performance) is in no way to be confused with the altruistic and heroic Davy Crockett; beneath all the apparent heart-to-heart talks with the players and Big Speeches in the locker room is a completely self-serving opportunist who sees his players not as human beings but only as means to his own survival.

(If you're not convinced of the latter point, go back and study how Berg films the coach's removal of the players' labels in the final scenes.) With his relentless, nervous camerawork, use of dark, gritty textures and endless uncomfortably extreme close-ups, Berg has made a film that looks a whole lot more like a prison documentary than a sports movie, and I think that's the whole point: the team's moments of joy, triumph or elation are extremely fleeting while pain, agony and frustration are dwelt upon almost to the level of the crucifixion in a certain controversial Mel Gibson-made movie.

(There's not even much fun to be had in the early, post-game party sequences: the two sexual encounters we see result immediately in emotional rawness not often seen outside the films of Neil LaBute.

) Don't forget: the co-writer/director is the same Peter Berg who a few years ago gave us Very Bad Things, a slashing, darker-than-dark satire (which I think I was the only person in the world not related to Berg who actually liked!) about people who absolutely don't care who they hurt (or, more often, kill) to get their share of The American Dream.