Any Given Judgment Day

Al Pacino is the disgraced college football coach in Paterno.

FOR DECADES, filmmakers have turned to Al Pacino when they’ve wanted a galvanic leading man—a declaimer, a pop-top. But as the title character in the HBO movie Paterno, the actor barely speaks, and when he does it’s in monosyllables, with tiny shrugs and eyes fixed on the ground. For 61 years, Joe Paterno coached football at Penn State, 46 of them as head coach, but the figure onscreen is neither the dominating, sometimes querulous, often cantankerous figure we watched in press conferences nor the firm moralist who guided his players on and off the field. The movie’s focus is the few weeks in 2011 before and after allegations broke that Jerry Sandusky, Paterno’s former defensive coordinator, had sexually abused boys in and around college sports facilities—and that Paterno had been informed but did nothing beyond passing the buck to PSU officials Tim Curley and Gary Schultz. This is Paterno’s bitter end.