The script doesn’t fabricate big moments for Pacino to chew scenery, and he shines most when Paterno is just sitting around a dinner table as loved ones and crisis managers work on strategy. Even under a Teflon hairpiece, some mostly unobtrusive makeup and the coach’s trademark oversized, boxy glasses, Pacino challenges you to reconcile conflicting qualities - his Paterno is avuncular, scholarly, frail, fiery and deluded - and he doesn’t let Paterno off the hook for anything, while making it easily possible for charitable viewers to still do so. If Wizard of Lies was characterized by how De Niro steered away from his most familiar mannerisms in surprising ways, Paterno basically delivers exactly what you’d expect from an Al Pacino performance as Joe Paterno - albeit with less loud-voiced blustering and more in the shambling, unassuming vein of his HBO Kevorkian. The more intended inference is probably that of a myopic man whose focus on football and intellectual pursuits - the family has to explain “sodomy” to him in historical Greek terms - was intentional, but not necessarily malignant. Less generous viewers will probably read a willful obfuscation into Paterno’s attempts to distance himself from both foreknowledge and responsibility. Some viewers are likely to infer some measure of senility from Paterno’s struggles to process how Sandusky’s misdeeds relate to him or to the university, despite efforts by wife Sue (underused Kathy Baker), son Scott (effectively sympathetic Greg Grunberg) and daughter Mary Kay (Annie Parisse) to get certain aspects of the horror to sink in.

JoePa, the film’s central human figure, is left intentionally fuzzy. They’re easy straw men in fungible character-actor suits, practically faceless figures of institutional contempt. None of the three is presented with any interiority or complexity. The film takes the safe approach of indicting athletic director Tim Curley (Steve Coulter), school president Graham Spanier (Tom Kemp) and vice president Gary Schultz (Murphy Guyer), since the same has already been done legally. There’s a framing device that establishes Paterno having flashbacks from the claustrophobic confines of a hospital CT scanner - including of interactions Paterno couldn’t have been privy to, as well as flashbacks for other characters. The script is a slightly confounding structural mess. She’s rarely a hero of this movie, though. By all rights, Ganim is a hero of this story. A parallel story focuses on cub reporter Sara Ganim (Riley Keough), a Penn State grad who becomes the center of a media maelstrom when people realize she broke the Sandusky story in a small newspaper months earlier, but was largely ignored. It’s a story centered around the fall of Paterno, the 84-year-old legend credited with elevating Penn State to international prominence and with nurturing generations of student athletes.

Richards’ script is set primarily over two chaotic weeks in which Paterno broke an NCAA record for Division I coaching wins, grand jury findings came down against Sandusky (Jim Johnson) and Penn State became a powder keg of controversy over which parts of the unfolding tragedy could have been prevented years earlier and decades earlier by which key figures at the university. Watch Al Pacino in First Trailer for HBO's 'Paterno'ĭebora Cahn and John C.

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