Paterno

For what the film does with the subject under scrutiny, Paterno deserves all the praise revoked from the disgraced coach. It speaks to viewers with disparate reactions, but it also speaks to anyone who didn’t dig into the scandal at the time by outlining what happens when we are too quick to defend the famous faces instead of those claiming to be victimized by them.

Unsettling and riveting and scathing.

Brilliant as ever, Pacino is the master trickster who manages to both demonize and humanize Paterno.

Paterno’s makers, director Barry Levinson and writers Debora Cahn and John C. Richards, have a risky idea that mostly pays off: They’ve constructed their film around a vacuum. ... That’s the downside to making your protagonist semi-mute and depriving him of a revelatory final scene. But the upside, I think, is worth it. The subject of Paterno isn’t venality. ... It’s his shrunkenness that’s the cautionary tale.

Al Pacino’s Paterno is so convincing, and eerily lifelike it becomes necessary from time to time, to remember that this isn’t the actual coach. ... The film may offer no verdict about the coach but there’s plenty of another kind of judgment here, captured vividly in the recurrent images of football violence. More eloquent still are the pictures of the raging mobs rioting over the threats to Paterno’s status.

This film is about the culture of complicity that grew up around Sandusky’s crimes, primarily because no one wanted to tarnish or slow down the awe-inspiring triumphs that Paterno was scoring as the winningest coach in college football. It’s an unusual way to tell this story, but Pacino and director Barry Levinson pull it off, scoring their own, more low-key, triumph. ... It’s a very good performance in a very good film that avoids sensationalizing the crimes in order to explore pain on many levels.

Paterno is a small movie that tells a story many of us already know, but it nonetheless makes its big point strategically and effectively.

It’s an engaging (and, perhaps to some defenders of Joe Paterno, it will be an enraging) film that explores character, the politics of college athletics and the value of local journalism in a style that’s more process piece thriller than it is anything like a biopic given how “Paterno” concentrates on a short period in the coach’s life.

It's a fine, if recessive, performance, but Paterno himself gets lost in the shuffle as director Barry Levinson covers every aspect of the story. [6/13 Apr 2018, p.84]

Mr. Levinson lays this out with considerable skill and energy, but he’s not entirely successful at turning it into drama. There’s tension around the question of what exactly Paterno knew and when he knew it, and a late plot twist provides what appear to be some answers, but it feels tacked on.

When the film feels needlessly vague or remote, Pacino brings it back in with just a look or a sigh.

The film is watchable, certainly, but also wayward. Its effects feel scattered, its points lost as the story looks here, looks there; Paterno has many things to show you, but less to say.

A drama about sexual abuse and institutional corruption might seem topical, but all Paterno offers its audience is a chance to re-experience the cable news cycle of yesteryear.

The end result is a film that clumsily tries to sympathize with Paterno instead of the young boys he chose to ignore until it was too late. ... [Pacino] is less at ease with his take on Joe Pa, delivering a performance of a man just as uneven as the film it is named after. ... Riley Keough, Kathy Baker and Annie Parisse deliver strong performances as Ganim, Joe’s wife, Sue, and his daughter Mary Kay respectively.

Where Paterno feels somewhat hollow, as "Wizard of Lies" did, is by essentially joining this story late in the fourth quarter. Yes, it's interesting to watch Paterno's end as his family tries to rally around him, but there are too-few glimpses of Penn St. in his heyday, when he and others conveniently looked the other way.

Paterno is a more distinctive-looking movie than a lot of these HBO biopics, though, again, it isn't really a biopic. Thin supporting characters, the strange structural choices and the still-elusive nature of several facts in the timeline make Paterno more of an introspective snapshot of a tragic moment of reckoning than anything revelatory.

The script is weak and the direction is weaker, as Levinson tries to walk a fine line on the issue of Paterno’s involvement for the sake of the tacked-on finale. Fortunately, Pacino’s performance counterbalances the problems with the film, as do solid performances by Kathy Baker as Paterno’s wife, Sue, and Riley Keough as journalist Sara Ganim, who would win a Pulitzer Prize for her work on the sordid case.