‘Paterno’ premieres Saturday on HBO. Here's a review

Let’s get the awkward business out of the way first: whatever your opinion about Joe Paterno or the fallout of the Jerry Sandusky scandal, a premium cable movie starring Al Pacino is unlikely to sway the needle one way or the other.

Nevertheless, a project bearing an uncanny resemblance to the one I just described will debut at 8 p.m. Saturday, so feel free to cancel or renew your HBO subscriptions accordingly.

Director Barry Levinson (“Good Morning, Vietnam,” “Wag the Dog”) tries to reconcile the litany of personal and institutional failures that led to Jerry Sandusky being found guilty of 45 counts of child sexual abuse.

The movie suggests — sometimes loudly and with frantic pantomiming — that the school, the public and the media were transfixed by football and JoePa at the expense of Sandusky’s young victims.

It’s an argument that would carry more weight if it wasn't coming from a film called “Paterno.” Levinson structures his movie like a Greek tragedy with shoulder pads. The two-week gap between Paterno becoming the winningest coach in major college football and being unceremoniously terminated over the phone is littered with suffocating closeups, some odd stylistic flourishes and a score that could qualify as minimalist if it was just a little lighter on its feet.

Over the span of a 1-hour and 45 minute run-time, Pacino is probably the most reserved thing you’ll encounter.

It’s not a flashy role. There aren’t any big speeches and I can only think of one moment where the actor is forced to raise his voice above the sedate octave it hovers at for so much of the film. Paterno — here at least — is an anchor of a man proposed of a disciplined, singular focus. And in this take, it might be what destroys him.

Scenes set around the Paterno family home, with with his wife and adult children, are among the more engaging and I suspect it’s because they afford Levinson the opportunity to engage the questions he seems most interested in trying to pair with answers.

How did this happen? How could it happen? It doesn’t leave room for much else and subplots involving Sara Ganim (Riley Keough), the journalist who broke the Sandusky story, and survivor Aaron Fisher (Benjamin Cook) could have been made less perfunctory in a roomier miniseries format. (Full disclosure: Ganim, now with CNN, is a former Centre Daily Times reporter.)

Whether “Paterno” will make you angry or not I cannot say. As for whether or not it should make you angry — well, that’s between you and your cable provider.

This story was originally published April 6, 2018 at 12:47 PM with the headline "‘Paterno’ premieres Saturday on HBO. Here's a review."