Maybe a movie isn’t the best way to tell the Sandusky story.
I say this after a mini-binge: I watched “Happy Valley” at the State Theatre on Friday night and streamed “365 Days: A Year in Happy Valley” on my computer over the weekend.
The two documentaries left me wanting both more and less, which is to say I disagreed with some of the filmmakers’ choices of what to put in and what to leave out.
This was bound to happen. If you live in Pocatello, Idaho, any 90-minute film about the scandal will probably tell you a lot more about it than you already knew. If you’re a local, it will probably tell you a lot less.
For this reason, director Amir Bar-Lev said he was way more nervous about showing “Happy Valley” in Happy Valley than he was about screening it in New York or L.A. It showed.
He answered several questions by saying either that you can’t possibly stuff every facet of a complex story into a film, which is unquestionably true, but still sounded defensive; or that the film is a work of art, not journalism, which meant, I suppose, that its faithfulness to the facts could not be challenged.
So what’s missing from “Happy Valley”? I wanted some Mike McQueary. To my way of thinking, what McQueary saw in the locker room, what he told Joe Paterno, what Paterno told Tim Curley and what Paterno, Curley, Gary Schultz and Graham Spanier discussed among themselves remain at the confounding core of this whole steaming pile of dung. But the film pays scant attention to this part of the story.
Absent an examination of the honchos’ confabs, we’re left with a portrait of a community that looks a little too pigskin-possessed for its own good. Nothing terribly revelatory there. What’s disappointing is that the only critique of that culture comes from Andrew Shubin, an attorney for some of Sandusky’s victims.
Shubin is articulate, but his status as an advocate creates the impression that the lone voice in the wilderness belongs to the person with an interest in getting a payday for his clients and himself. (My colleague Matt Jordan also speaks eloquently about the culture of football in the film but he comes across more as an interpreter than a critic.)
Apart from a clumsy moment when Jay Paterno complains about the scandal derailing what was shaping up to be a pretty nice season for the Nittany Lions – glad someone had his priorities straight! – the Paternos are loyal and likable in the film, the paterfamilias the most likable of all.
Every time someone tries to pin angel’s wings on him, JoePa rips them off. His assessment of the role of football in people’s lives is dead-on: Game Day is an opportunity for old friends to gather, share food and drink and watch a football game. Then he acknowledges that the whole thing is a little crazy.
And when his acolytes gather at his house the night a panic-stricken Board of Trustees gives him his pink slip, he thanks them for coming, then tells them to go study. Jeepers, Coach, do we have to?
The most compelling figure in the film is student Tyler Estright. Estright is an unapologetic football-obsessed maniac, refreshingly cynical about the various penitential candle-lightings and mid-field kneelings that followed the revelations of November 2011. Yes, yes, he says, what Sandusky did was terrible and of course our hearts go out to his victims, now can we just get back to telling Nebraska’s quarterback that he’s going home in a hearse?
“365 Days” is a prettier film to look at, but otherwise it’s a mess. At a certain point, an animated arrow swoops from Centre County to Lancaster County, where in 2006 a gunman killed five Amish girls in a one-room schoolhouse. We then get a powerful lesson in Amish forgiveness, but it is not at all clear how the filmmakers intend us to apply that lesson to what happened back in Happy Valley. Are we to forgive Jerry Sandusky? Joe Paterno? The BOT? How about Louis Freeh or Mark Emmert?
“365 Days” also seems confused about Paterno’s sorrow over not having “done more” when he heard about Sandusky’s Lasch Building sex abuse allegations. The narrative is so wedded to the Paterno mythos that it somehow construes his regret as further proof of his righteousness.
Finally, the film gives us a redeemer in the person of Bill O’Brien, who, sadly, doesn’t hang around long enough to earn wall space on Michael Pilato’s Hiester Street mural.
I’m sure “Gidget Goes to Happy Valley” and “Happy Valley of the Dolls” are coming soon to a theatre near me, but rather than sit through another partial telling of a complex tale, I might just wait for the definitive book.
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