![]() ![]() At the age of 84, Paterno is so beloved as "a coach, an educator, and a humanitarian" that a statue is outside Beaver Stadium, and so powerful that when university president Graham Spanier and athletic director Tim Curley asked Paterno to retire in 2005, he refused. During 61 years at Penn State University, he helped the former "cow college" quintuple its financial endowment and build Paterno Library. On OctoPaterno wins his 409th game as head coach of the Penn State Nittany Lions football team. The film premiered on HBO on April 7, 2018.Īs Joe Paterno enters an MRI machine in November 2011 he recalls events in his life. Riley Keough, Kathy Baker, Greg Grunberg and Annie Parisse also star. It stars Al Pacino as former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, and his career leading up to his dismissal following the university's child sex abuse scandal in 2011. It’s his shrunkenness that’s the cautionary tale.Paterno is a 2018 American television drama film directed by Barry Levinson. He was able, like so many people in power, to hear the rumors and go on, barely troubled, about his business. The potential crimes of Jerry Sandusky were simply outside Paterno’s frame of reference. It’s something more difficult to capture but maybe more important to reckon with. It isn’t even - despite the behavior of PSU officials - the obstruction of justice that allowed a sexual predator to operate for years. That’s the downside to making your protagonist semi-mute and depriving him of a revelatory final scene. Did Paterno say nothing for fear he would look as if he were sabotaging a rival? Who knows, really? No one even alludes to the fact that Paterno didn’t like his popular, sociable former assistant coach, who for a while looked like Paterno’s successor. They keep Sandusky almost entirely out of the movie. The filmmakers, erring on the side of caution, miss one obvious source of drama. Some of the hostile student encounters feel shoehorned in, and a scene in which teens chase Fisher, shouting “Faggot!” is painfully clunky. It’s through her eyes that we see the hostility of so many Penn State students, who show up at Paterno’s house, chanting “Joe Pa!” and riot when the coach is fired. Much of Paterno focuses on Harrisburg Patriot-News reporter Sara Ganim (Riley Keough), who would win a Pulitzer for breaking the story and served as a sensitive liaison between the public and the boy, Aaron Fisher (Ben Cook), whose complaint finally (after three years) led to charges against Sandusky. Levinson whips up a lot of activity around his nearly still center, early on rivaling Oliver Stone in Any Given Sunday (featuring Pacino as a more dynamic coach) for smash cuts and TV-talking-head inserts. Sometimes he opens and closes his mouth like a slowly suffocating fish. With his face half-shrouded in darkness, he looks gnomish. Pacino has been appended with a suitable schnoz and mostly disappears into the part. ![]() (He seems insane.) Queried by family members (the very fine Kathy Baker as his wife, Greg Grunberg and Larry Mitchell his sons, and Annie Parisse his daughter), Paterno insists that Mike McQueary, the man who reported seeing Sandusky with a child, didn’t know what he saw and that Paterno himself reported it to Curley and Schultz. He refuses for days even to read the formal charges, insisting that he has to focus on the coming game against Nebraska. Faced with the allegations against Sandusky, Paterno goes deep into himself. It’s framed as a flashback of the 84-year-old Paterno’s memories as he’s lying in an MRI scanner tube, being doubly exposed. Richards, have a risky idea that mostly pays off: They’ve constructed their film around a vacuum. Paterno’s makers, director Barry Levinson and writers Debora Cahn and John C. ![]()
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