Friday Night Lights - Pathological Football

my rating: Nathan's rating:

I went to a high school that didn't have any athletic programs, and after seeing Friday Night Lights, I thanks the gods that I was able to get an education in a place that was free of that sort of thing. The movie is (mostly) a welcome deviation from the standard Hollywood "sports movie" formula in which a team or player triumphs over adversity to make it to the championships and so on.

Instead it portrays academic athletics (in this case high school football) as the focus of dysfunctional communities. This isn't the story of a high school and a town that have lost sight of the true spirit of football; this is the story of a community and its citizens who have been twisted into horrible people by football.

You have town leaders who tell the coach that the team is going to win, period. You have teachers who let students slide through classes without learning anything because it'll give the team a good player for a couple years. You have former players whose lives since graduation are so empty that they have nothing to live for but to live vicariously through their children. You have neighbors who put "for sale" signs in the coach's yard when they lose a game. You have parents who'll risk their child's health and safety to let him play.

It's not "town spirit"... it's more like a town haunting. Scene after scene of abuse... psychological, physical, mental... and the people who are supposed to be looking out for the well-being of these kids - their parents, their educators, their coaches - are the ones fucking them up.

Unfortunately, the script changes direction near the end and undercuts everything it was trying to say before that. It's not quite a textbook Hollywood ending, but it's full of plays pulled from the sports-movie playbook, even the "play it for the gipper" scene. At the end it almost tries to tell the audience that these poor abused boys are going to be alright, even though we'd already seen what abuse-perpetuating wrecks other former athletes turned out to be.

It also can't decide whether to present the coach as a victim of the town's obsession (they turn against him when he doesn't give the wins they want), as part of the problem himself (telling his players to "be perfect" and blaming them personally for their every shortcoming), or as an inspiration for the players (in a final locker-room speech in which he suddenly shows a hint of perspective about the game).

But at least it raised the questions in the first 3/4 of the movie, with enough disturbing scenes that the thin papering-over of the ending doesn't completely wipe them from memory.

I know it's possible to play sports in school and to get good things out of it. I've had friends who've done that, and they were glad they did. But it's always seemed to me that they enjoyed in spite of the athletics system, not because of it.

If someone wants to make a movie about athletes overcoming great odds to be victorious, how about one about some high school students who say "to hell" with school spirit, community support, family expectations, and the win-at-any-cost mentality of academic athletics, and learn how to have fun and enrich their lives by playing games together?