"Paterno" on HBO

[+ WilliamM]

Television

Review: Al Pacino Stars in HBO’s ‘Paterno,’ a Tragedy Without a Hero

Paterno

• NYT Critic’s Pick
  

By MIKE HALEAPRIL 6, 2018

 

In HBO’s “Paterno,” Al Pacino plays Joe Paterno, the famed football coach at Penn State whose career and reputation were undone by a sexual abuse scandal involving an assistant coach. Credit Atsushi Nishijima/HBO, via Associated Press

HBO’s “Paterno” is a film about a real-life sex-abuse scandal in which the abuser and the abused are relegated to supporting roles. A dogged reporter (Riley Keough) and one brave victim (Benjamin Cook) get a fair bit of screen time to help fill in the historical record, but they’re not at the center of the story. Jerry Sandusky, the perpetrator, is relegated to a cameo.

 

The writers, Debora Cahn and John C. Richards, and the director, Barry Levinson, focus instead on Joe Paterno, the beloved head coach of the Penn State football team who froze in the headlights and got run over by history. There’s a lot of clamor and fuss in “Paterno,” which has its premiere Saturday, but at heart it’s a film about the lack of action — about things that didn’t get done.

 

The tightly constructed film — at 1 hour 40 minutes, it’s a chamber piece by current television standards — is set during two weeks in 2011, before and after the indictment of Mr. Sandusky, the former Penn State assistant football coach, on 52 counts of sexual abuse of minors. Paterno, whose epic career ended when he was fired a few days after the indictment was announced, lies inside an M.R.I. machine (he died of lung cancer in January 2012), and we watch both recent and more distant events as he recalls them.

 

Al Pacino plays Paterno, and in keeping with the film’s conception, he gives a tamped-down, contained performance. His Paterno is still intelligent and possessed of the quick, pragmatic instincts of a leader at 84, but he’s hollow: His life is built around a work ethic, and his fatal failure to follow through on reports of Sandusky’s crimes isn’t about corruption or complicity, it’s about single-mindedness. He simply won’t allow himself to be distracted from football.

 

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I attended Penn State as a grad student when Joe Paterno took over in the 1960s. The football stadium is as huge as his ego.

 

So I watched the HBO drama for the other characters, especially the victims. Benjamin Cook is wonderful as the "one brave victim." Also, Riley Keough as the reporter nicely balances all the attention given to Paterno and his family.

[Kenny]

I have it DVR’d. Interesting idea to do a movie about an enabler, rather than the criminal or the victims.

[+ WilliamM]

I have it DVR’d. Interesting idea to do a movie about an enabler, rather than the criminal or the victims.

 

Benjamin Cook is too good looking for his role, but he makes it work anyway.

[+ quoththeraven]

The idea that Paterno's downfall was singlemindedness is pernicious. Willful blindness and an abdication of responsibility is complicity.

[Kenny]

Watched it. Pretty good, I thought. The mob-ocracy of support for complicit Joe Pa gave me the willies.

[YOUNG_LA_DOM]

He went from Penn State to the STATE pen

[Becket]

To each his own I suppose, but it creeps me out that that film has any place on this site.