At first there seems to be a lot going on in Barry Levinson's HBO film, Paterno (2018). Football players crack heads together while Penn State administrators huddle in dank tunnels fearful of indictments coming their way; the superannuated Joe Paterno is slid into another tunnel, this enclosure an MRI and seems to hallucinate images from his past and a plucky girl reporter points out the infamous pedophile, Jerry Sandusky, in a bar and mutters that everyone ignored her story about his misdeeds published three years earlier. But indictments are issued, then, concealed, then, disclosed again and a media feeding frenzy ensues. Paterno, played by Al Pacino, is 84 and he seems remote from the hulabaloo -- he insists that the story doesn't affect him and that he must prepare for next Saturday's game with Nebraska's Big Red. A week passes. The scandal can't be contained and Paterno is fired from his position as coach for the Penn State football team, a job that he has held for forty years or more. The students riot in his support and a lonely tormented victim of Sandusky's rapes is bullied and beaten on campus. Paterno and members of his family inexplicably quote Virgil in Latin -- I presume Paterno may have taught Latin at some point in his long career. After some more sound and fury, the film peters out inconclusively, its makers apparently profoundly uncertain as to what they were trying to accomplish with this film. This is a shame because Pacino is good and the supporting players are all impeccably realistic -- conflicted by the claims and uncertain as to how to react. But the people who made the movie didn't know what it was about and so the picture has no dramatic arc -- it literally goes nowhere.
At the outset, the model for the movie seems to be journalism, beleaguered reporters struggle to investigate and make a public a scandalous story. The film is percussively edited and the administrative powers at Penn State are sinister in their efforts to suppress the story. So for a half hour or so, the film resembles Spotlight, the Oscar-winning movie about reporters uncovering sexual abuse by priests in the Boston diocese. The film slips into melodrama with an ill-conceived subplot (never really developed) about one of the hapless victims. Then, Levinson and Pacino take a stab at King Lear -- Pacino sometimes seems doddering and there is a willful quality about his denial of responsibility. (When he learned about Sandusky raping a kid in the Penn State shower-room, he reported the charge to his bosses and did nothing more.) He can't keep his mind focused on the real issues and keeps slipping into non sequiturs. However, he is surrounded by a loyal and decent family (his sons and their wives express reasonable regard for the suffering of the victims) and they struggle to sort out the situation notwithstanding the old man's increasingly unavailing claims that he has done nothing wrong. Clearly, the script has been whittled down from something much larger -- for instance, there is a subplot about documents in a file that is abruptly curtailed and simply confusing: you expect the shoe to drop that the documents have been either hidden or destroyed or destroyed while someone else kept copies of them revealing the spoliation of these materials. But nothing happens with this subplot -- after some close-ups of the documents and some portentous shots in poorly lit offices, this sequence just fades away. By the film's climax, Paterno's firing from Penn State, the movie has completely lost its way. When my Labrador retriever goes outside in the morning to defecate, she prances in ever more agitated and tightening circles before doing her business. The film shows a wordless, agitated Joe Paterno twisting and turning in some sort of poorly defined, but urgent, agony. In general, the movie has been witty, with lots of rat-a-tat-tat dialogue influenced by writers like Aaron Sorkin -- people are always telling us what they think and what they think others should think. But at the film's climax, Paterno just whirls around and around like my dog -- words elude him and the sequence elongates over several minutes; it's a huge embarrassment and signals that the people that wrote this movie didn't really understand what it was about or how it should be ended. The movie concludes with a scene in which it is breathlessly revealed that Paterno knew about Jerry Sandusky's depredations as early as 1976 -- but this doesn't really register with the viewer: you're apt to shrug and say "So what?" And the big reveal that Paterno allowed his own kids to swim in a hotel pool with the loathsome Sandusky is a cheap shot -- Sandusky raped his victims in the dark corners of deserted locker rooms; he didn't molest anyone in a public pool, particularly with their parents present. So who cares whether Sandusky swam with Paterno's teenage kids? Is the film expressing some sort of weird taboo, that it is "unclean" to be in the same water with a pedophile? It's too bad that the movie completely collapses in its last half-hour -- up to that point, the show was brisk, witty, with a lot of intense dialogue expressing all sorts of interesting positions. But the movie doesn't know what to make of Paterno's complicity and, so, devolves into empty mannerism.
Jerry Sandusky apparently was a very charismatic guy as demonstrated by archival footage in the film. This was the first dramatic film I’ve seen to be about someone I know although I didn’t know it at the time, Sara Ganim, who has gone on to a remarkably average career on CNN after a triumphant emergence as a major player in journalism at a young age. She is played here by Keough, a granddaughter of Elvis who never met the man, who is an insecure blanket bearer of hopeless consolation. I found this film strangely riveting though very false in some hard to define way. I said there’s really not much of a movie here.
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