PATERNO, THE MOVIE

By Charles Snow

AL PACINO AS JOE PATERNO

Recently I watched Paterno, HBO’s made-for-TV movie. I couldn’t tell for certain from the previews what this movie was going to be about. Would it focus on the child sexual abuse scandal at Penn State caused by Jerry Sandusky, Paterno’s long-time assistant coach? Would it be about Paterno the fallen hero, a legendary football coach being brought down by the Sandusky scandal and Penn State’s handling of it? Or, perhaps, would it be a standard biopic of Paterno the man – his childhood experiences, five-decade leadership of the Penn State football program, and his many accomplishments as an individual? Remember, also, I was a faculty member at Penn State during much of this period, so I could not approach the movie with any pretense of objectivity.

As movies go, I did not find Paterno to be riveting drama. In fact, I did not think the movie was emotional or moving at all. Al Pacino did a good job of imitating Paterno’s gruff voice and limping gait, but the other performances were as average as one would expect from a TV movie. The Sandusky scandal had all the makings of a very interesting movie – if a screenwriter unleashed his or her imagination and created a fictional movie using the real characters and context.

Paterno was an icon: great football coach, Catholic churchgoer, fundraising chairman of the campaign to expand the Penn State library, possible Republican gubernatorial candidate after retirement, and much more. Sandusky was a great defensive coach who many credited for Penn State’s two national football championships. He also started the Second Mile, a charitable organization that helped more than 10,000 underprivileged kids (and also served as his conduit for finding boys to groom).

The local District Attorney who decided not to press charges against Sandusky in one particular incident mysteriously disappeared and has not been heard from since. Penn State’s Board of Trustees fired Paterno without bothering to follow the norms and practices of due process. Three top Penn State administrators may or may not have covered up portions of this mess (the court decided they did not and convicted them of the lesser charge of child endangerment). And, all of this behavior occurred over a period of many years in a small Pennsylvania town where virtually everybody bleeds Blue and White.

The movie I saw seemed to be Paterno the ‘conflicted man’, apparently unaware of Sandusky’s criminal behavior until he is confronted with it by Sandusky’s indictment and, later, in some stiff and awkward conversations with his family members. If this was the movie’s intent, then it should have been tightly focused on the various conflicts that Paterno wrestled with: his own failings in helping a child in need, his relationship with Sandusky, and his role as an ambassador of Penn State University. Pacino could have portrayed the pained and struggling Paterno with the emotions needed to make this a movie truly worth watching.

PATERNO AND SANDUSKY