REVIEWED - FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS: FOR domestic readers who once spent the hours after school shivering on windswept, cratered sports fields praying the ball would stay elsewhere, Friday Night Lights, the true story of a year in the life of a high school football team from Odessa, Texas, will seem as exotic and foreign as would an anthropological study of the Batwa pygmies of Uganda.
If this thrilling film is to be believed, the citizens of Odessa, like the possessed characters of some Stephen King story, follow the school's progress through the state championship with quite lunatic zeal. After a particularly ignominious defeat, coach Billy Bob Thornton drives away from the team's vast stadium - the Permian Panthers are, let me repeat, merely a school team - listening to the citizens rant on a phone-in show. "They're doing too much learnin' at that school," one outraged caller complains.
This is, we are told, a dull town, and playing football gives the boys their sole chance at a few moments of glamour. As a disappointed father, once a player on a championship-winning team, explains to his son, these small-town heroes have one short year to store up enough exciting memories to sustain them through the rest of their miserable lives. The talented young cast all seem, despite their mighty shoulders and redwood thighs, diminished by the pressure of expectation.
Friday Night Lights, unlike the recent, stupefying basketball flick Coach Carter, paints an unexpectedly sombre picture of its chosen sport. Rendered in bleak, desaturated colours, the film, adapted from an acclaimed book by HG Bissinger, forcefully communicates the danger and violence of American football: members of the team vomit blood; helmets are kicked into faces; every tackle is accompanied by a rattling, nauseating thud. But Peter Berg, director of such ho-hum fare as Very Bad Things, clearly loves this weird game; the dazzlingly edited action sequences, often shot with hand-held camera, should manage the tricky business of instilling tension and excitement even in those viewers - such as this one - who have never bothered to learn the rules.
Bolstered by a dignified performance from Thornton at his least eccentric, Friday Night Lights, though not entirely free of cliche, deserves a place in the premier league (or whatever the gridiron equivalent might be) of sports movies.
