Kathy Bates was wife Sue and Greg Grunberg, Larry Mitchell and Annie Parisse played children Scott, Jay & Mary Kay.
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The supporting players in the movie played the supporting players in JoePa’s life – his family. They were played by Steve Coulter and Tom Kemp respectively. Athletic Director Timothy Curley and President Graham Spanier also had some screen time as they also skirted around the scandal and all lost their jobs as a result. Jim Johnson as Jerry Sandusky and Darren Goldstein as Mike McQueary appear ever so briefly. While in the MRI he reflects back on his football career and his family and the turbulent times that rocked his program and Penn State University during the Sandusky scandal. This Made-For-TV movie starts with a confused Joe Paterno in the hospital with terminal lung cancer. They were the personal moments that JoePa had, whether they were the moments in the MRI machine that start the movie or the alone time in his bedroom. Those moments are the crucial ones we hoped to see but knew there was no way we really could.
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Some scenes, that don’t feature JoePa, don’t even get played out to their conclusion and, of course, there is dramatic license employed. The 105-minute piece leaves things open-ended. Pacino played him simply and without too much dialog.
He showed loyalty and generosity throughout his career and life and this scandal rocked him to the core. The movie’s setting is two weeks in November 2011, during which the late Penn State coach won his record-setting 409th career game, was fired in his 46th season and was diagnosed with lung cancer. I think that is because JoePa was the one on the pedestal the one revered by all as the greatest college coach ever and the one person who fell the hardest from glory. As much as I liked seeing JoePa depicted on screen by Pacino the larger story was secondary. The lives and stress of any victim or periphery characters was not a focus. The crimes were alluded to and never somehow tastefully played out. The real criminal of the piece, Sandusky, was just seen and never heard in the piece. This film shows the tumult JoePa was under and the fall he took in the aftermath of the Jerry Sandusky scandal. He has proved he can pull it off with Roy Cohn, Jack Kevorkian, Phil Spector and now Joe Paterno for an HBO event, but his character and his story is just a part of the larger picture here. That becomes most evident when a film is based on an incident that hits close to home as this one does for me.Īs much as I revered JoePa I’m not sure why he is the focus of this movie except that Al Pacino wanted to get behind another prosthetic nose and get lost in another tragic character. Those who learn their history via Hollywood are not getting accuracy.
They are entertainment pieces, not historical accounts. Never, ever take a movie based on true events as the gospel truth of what happened. My biggest takeaway from the movie was how quickly we are reminded that Hollywood skews the story and plays with the truths to get the story it wants to tell. WE ARE PENN STATE! Having gotten that factoid out of the way you can suspect that my pride would influence my take on HBO Films: PATERNO. He is affectionately called JoePa around here still. We lived the whole scandal nightly on the local news and protests and discussions were commonplace. Penn State is the University of pride in my neck of the woods and Joe Paterno was a legend indeed. This HBO Films presentation hits close to home for this writer.
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