Paterno

HBO’s “Paterno” opens with its eponymous character, former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno (Al Pacino), earning his record 409th collegiate football victory. If coaches typically stalk the sidelines, however, Paterno wound up coaching in the a skybox that day due to a pelvic injury, a fact the movie honors and which inadvertently makes for a stirring visual, evoking a king viewing his fiefdom from on high. That fiefdom is expressed by director Barry Levinson blending images of Paterno and his assistant coaches on the sideline conferring with (yelling at) players with raucous fans in the stands, TV production people behind the scenes beaming the entire spectacle across the continent, and school administrators conferring in a stadium hallway. It is a sequence summarizing college football’s cacophonous, far-reaching nature, suggesting it is so much more than what happens on the field.

That, of course, is what led to Paterno’s kingdom crumbling despite his record number of wins, when in late 2011 former Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky was indicted on multiple accounts of child abuse. In the aftermath, questions emerged of how much Joe Paterno knew and when he knew it, though in the rush to get those answers and in the subsequent fall of both Paterno and the program he had built, the heinous nature of Sandusky’s crimes and his myriad victims too often became clouded over. And if you wish the pain inflicted on the victims might have been lingered over more, Levinson does not ignore those affected, spotlighting Aaron Fisher (Ben Cook), Victim One. We don’t really get to know him, but we do see what he goes through, a bout of bullying at school communicating what was risked by coming forward in a place where the football coach was deity that could do no wrong.

We meet Fisher through Sara Ganim (Riley Keough), the reporter who broke the story for Harrisburg’s Patriot-News. Keough is convincing in her air of being both sort of overwhelmed by the scope of the story but also hyper-focused on getting it right. Her storyline suggests “Spotlight”, but there is little on-the-ground reporting shown, more just expository scenes in the office with her editor. Even so, what comes through is the idea that this information was just sort of lying out in the open with no one acting. She did not stand by; she seized on it.

Levinson relegates Sandusky entirely to the movie’s periphery, punting on the notion of why this monster did what he did, as if Levinson either suspected the audience would not be able to take it or because Levinson decided he could not take it himself. “Paterno” also struggles to show why no one did anything, limiting the conspiracy of inaction among high-ranking Penn State officials to clumsily shot flashbacks that betray the movie’s TV origins. In theory this inaction ties back to the community, but the community’s rendering is “Paterno’s” most egregious failing. I’m not sure if this was due to budget constrictions, but we see no towering shot of the 109,000 football seat stadium or wide frames of the campus and its students to see all that has been brought to bear in Paterno’s name. All we see are a few kids at some party Ganim attends and a few non-descript tight shots of angry students at a bar and on the street. What causes the community to unite in defiance when Paterno is canned never becomes clear, just sort of presumed, as if everyone already had the basic outline entering the movie.

For as little time as we spend in the community, we spend a lot of time inside the Paterno home, which is where the movie shines. A scene in which the Paterno family resorts to Googling to find a crisis manager emblemizes how they are so insulated within their castle walls that they are ill-equipped to manage such a volatile situation. And no one, we realize, is more ill-equipped than Paterno himself, a fact connected both to his age and his obsession. If a series of soppy, made-for-TV-ish flashbacks are meant to gradually evince how Coach Paterno did have the facts in front of him the whole time, Pacino’s performance away from these narrative embellishments is proof enough of Paterno’s negligence, willful or otherwise.

If occasionally, when his voice rises, Pacino sounds like Pacino, he mostly buries himself in the part, evincing an eternally distracted man unable to wrap his mind around what is happening. The movie’s most disturbingly affecting scenes find Paterno at home as his family squabbles, stranded on the edge, hearing but not listening, which, in close-ups, allows Pacino to make a feast of confused, wandering eyes. Cruelly, he can’t grasp what the fuss is all about, not with another game looming. stick to sports. Can’t I, you sense him thinking, just stick to sports?

Danny Collins

Although “Danny Collins” is a fictional musical biopic, rooted in many of the genre’s customary clichés, it emits real-life autobiographical context in the form of its leading man. Al Pacino, after all, is a once-great acting titan now often reduced to wandering (hollering) in film star winter. That’s a fairly apt description of Danny Collins himself, a formerly great singer-songwriter who hasn’t penned a tune in thirty years and now plays the same Neil Diamond-ish hit over and over. The first time we see him, in fact, he’s putting on a helluva show, even if it’s obviously hollowed out, which is sort of like any latter day Pacino grandstanding performance. You half wonder if Al sits in his dressing room between takes with a tumbler of scotch, staring forlornly into the void, a la Danny Collins. Eventually, though, Danny gathers the seeds of a potential rebirth, and in doing so, you see Pacino himself truly take the reins of this turn.

“Danny Collins” is sort of like the easy listening version of “Crazy Heart.” The latter was the predictable rise, fall and semi-resurrection of a singer-songwriter, but there its character – the more ominously named Bad Blake – was truly washed up, playing bowling alleys and getting from gig-to-gig in a beat-up pickup truck, having to buy off-brand whiskey, ye gods. His redemption, of sorts, was triggered by bottoming out and going to rehab. Overall, the film was cuddlier than its rough & tumble synopsis suggests, but nevertheless its character knew truly hard times. The hard times of Danny Collins are more like the hard times of the 1%. Maybe he’s a sellout but his selling out has yielded grand extravagance; a chic home, an attractive (and really young) wife, souped-up sports car, the whole nine yards and just a bit further. And his come-to-Jesus moment isn’t really about touching bottom; it’s about being touched from on high. It seems John Lennon himself wrote a short letter to Danny Collins back when the latter was on top of the charts, advising (warning) him to stay true to his art. That letter, however, never made it to Danny – until now, that is, in the form of a birthday present from Danny’s manager (Christopher Plummer).

Deeming his career a colossal waste, Danny Collins cancels his tour and re-locates to a New Jersey Hilton where he promptly moves a grand piano into his room, purportedly to compose actual fresh material. There’s more to it than that, of course, as there must be, specifically in the familial troubles dogging him. And so, he seeks out the son (Bobby Cannavale) and daughter-in-law (Jennifer Garner) and granddaughter (Giselle Eisenberg) he has never seen, claiming he can’t buy his way to redemption even though that is more or less what he does. Still, it doesn’t strain credulity because Danny Collins is quite clearly a man used to hurling money at problems to fix them, and he can’t fully fashion his reclamation until realizing that simply being there for people is the necessary tonic. The sight of the shrunken man in suits only really suitable for ostentatious stage shows in tacky Vegas casinos patiently sitting in a hospital waiting room is a wonderful merging of the real world and the world Danny has always inhabited.

He’s made to sit in a hospital waiting room because his son, it turns out, has cancer, a twist which takes the film one crisis too far. It’s best when it play lighter, such as in its sequences at the New Jersey hotel where Danny Collins practically floats in on a billowy cloud, all smile and “patter”, playing matchmaker to the shy valet and bubbly front desk clerk. Danny also finds new love in the form of Mary Sinclair, the hotel manager. Her character is a predictable part nonetheless played to stone cold perfection by Annette Bening with a mixture of coyness, cordial toughness and the ever-present inkling of  genuine affection for the good intentions that lurk behind the over-the-top lapels of this in-your-face lothario.

If Danny Collins initially comes across like a caricature, it is the down-to-earth Mary that lends crucial aid in seeing through the pizzazz for the person. She’s there, of course, for him to lean on, to listen to his new song and provide encouragement as well as notes, not much else, but there is such delightful vivacity to their “patter”, such authenticity in their chemistry that it hardly matters. And the film, refreshingly, never forces them to fall in love, but rather just revel in the presence of the other. Mary helps Danny remember what it was like to just have fun and not phone it in, and “Danny Collins”, bless its soul, helps Al Pacino do the same.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Scarecrow (1973)

Although Jerry Schatzberg’s “Scarecrow” is firmly in the tradition of 70’s road movies, it often feels apart from its era, as if its pair of hobos could have existed just as easily during The Great Depression as Vietnam. That is underscored by the film’s astounding introductory shot, one that may as well be John Cox’s glorious Grey & Gold, a painting dated to 1942, come to life, heavy storm clouds assembling on the horizon as a few trees cower in the foreground. It’s Anytime, USA, and Max (Gene Hackman) wanders out of the frame, out of whimsical Americana and into the real world, two places that have long shared an uneasy alliance.

As with any road movie, the destination is both completely the point and not the point at all. The mythical journey’s end is Pittsburgh, the Steel City as Emerald City, where our principal duo intends to open a carwash, a venture Max has got figured down to the penny in a little Moleskin notebook that he waves around with the authority of any cocky CEO. “For every car, there’s dirt,” he proclaims in a platitude that is awe-inspiring for its utter worthlessness. He says this to Francis (Al Pacino), a polite, semi-knucklehead whom he ropes into being his business partner. Francis buys Max’s pitch not exactly hook, line and sinker but because, well, what else has he got going on? He says he’s been at sea the last few years, an explanation that might suggest a Naval stint, but just as easily suggests an itinerant. His only other aim is to deliver a lamp to the child he’s never seen in Detroit, the child of the mom he ran out on five years ago, and he clutches that gift like the hopeless chunk of symbolism it is.

You half-wonder how Francis has survived this long and you can tell Max half-wonders the same thing. Consider the mid-movie vignette inside a working prison where the duo gets sentenced for thirty days on account of some churlish behavior. Convinced it’s all the fault of Francis, which it isn’t, Max decrees that he doesn’t want to speak to his ally for the whole month. Francis obliges, more or less left to his own devices, becoming friendly with a fellow inmate who seems like a good guy until he isn’t, physically assaulting Francis. When Max finds about this, he sets the record straight with his fists, as he’s prone to do, demonstrating himself as a kind of self-imposed volatile guardian angel of Francis.

This entire sequence also speaks to the film’s vibe, one that routinely stops being what it’s “about” to be “about” something else for awhile instead. It also speaks to the characters and their supposed intentions, for as much as Max goes on and on about his foolproof scheme to clean cars, to get where he wants to be and do what he wants to do, all he really wants to do is prattle on about his own perceived genius and get in fights. It’s a film set on the road but it’s not about two people not really getting anywhere. It’s about two people, as we come to realize with each delay and each impulsive setback, that don’t want to get anywhere, that would rather be left to wandering.

And that’s why it’s so awful when they do get somewhere, back to Detroit to deliver the lamp, that absurd totem. And with a life’s worth of aimlessness brought to bear, Francis goes bonkers and then catatonic, a moment played perfectly by Pacino with escalating tension and then what’s less a release than a rapid deterioration. It speaks to Now as much as Then, and probably even Before, probably even For All Time. It’s the moment when the yellow brick road ends not in the promised land but pretty much where you knew it was going to end up the whole time.

The closing scenes are emotionally linked to the remarkable shot in Schatzberg’s previous film, the stunning “Panic in Needle Park”, that finds Kitty Wynn’s character strung out, all alone, on a park bench. Sometimes filling yourself with heroin doesn’t look any different from sweetly wrapping up a lamp and going out to find the American Dream.

Top 5 Actor vs. Actor Showdowns

I am a fervent adorer of "Ocean's Twelve", as we know, but rather than launch into yet another passionate argument for the film's unappreciated brilliance, I'd simply like to re-iterate that its single flaw is this: a scene was not included that featured George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Julia Roberts sitting in a room together and LITERALLY reading from a phonebook, trying to one-up each other. A Hollywood Actor Royal Rumble.

Last week I was listening to a podcast with Grantland founder Bill Simmons and the site's resident film critic, Pulitzer Prize winner Wesley Morris. Morris mentioned how Meryl Streep has openly admitted to competing with actresses in films. This led to a later discussion on how the infamous scene between Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro in the diner in "Heat" was essentially like a pickup basketball game, one on one, Jordan vs. Bird, which led to pitching an idea of re-visiting noted movie moments to ask "Who Won The Scene?" And this, as it must, got me to thinking.

Not necessarily about scenes and wondering who won them, but actorly competition, a full night of Hollywood's best squaring off in the ring, a stellar undercard and the monumental main event, live from Madison Square Garden.

Top 5 Actor vs. Actor Showdowns

Al Pacino vs. Denzel Washington

You want to get the undercard to a heavyweight title fight off to a fluffy start, and what better way than these two Oscar-winning titans hollering at each other for five rounds? But maybe it wouldn't just be hollering? Maybe the heat of battle would allow Al to re-locate his long-gone nuance and Denzel to internalize and, in turn, show us his soul. Or maybe not and they'd just holler, and five rounds of Pacino & Denzel hollering would be pretty cool. 

Amy Adams vs. Rachel Weisz 

I dare say it wouldn't have the pre-match buzz of our other bouts, but, trust me, this would bring the heat. Two chameleons, one American and one Brit, staring each other down and throwing elegant haymakers, gracefully swerving from sassy to charming to sexy to spinster to hippie to indie to classical to bawdy and back again. 

Christian Bale vs. Michael Shannon 

The intensity. Sweet Jesus, man, the INTENSITY!!!!!! They wouldn't touch (figurative) gloves, they would squint and spit and chew scenery. It would be exhausting in the best way possible. 

Cate Blanchett vs. Kate Winslet

You're toast, Blanchett. 

Daniel Day-Lewis vs. Meryl Streep

The main event. 15 rounds. No referee because he/she would just distract. A fury of tics and accents and costume changes and bone marrow embodiments. I'd think Streep might be the favorite, if only because Day-Lewis seems to require so much prep work and getting-into-character time. Unless he spent the months leading up to the bout prepping and getting-into-character. Still, no one has really ever counterpunched Day-Lewis, and Streep could counterpunch. But then, Streep has never had anyone get back up off the ropes. And Day-Lewis would get back up off the ropes. Let's call it even 'til we see it.

Heat

A semi truck resting beneath a freeway overpass barrels out from its hiding spot, directly toward an unsuspecting armored car that has stopped in the middle of the road for a stolen ambulance. The semi truck rams the armored car and sends it toppling onto its side and skidding into a line of cars at a nearby dealership. Finally, the armored car comes to a stop and as it does the festive blue ribbon that had been displayed above the gleaming automobiles softly falls to the cement. That’s the moment. The ribbon falling ever so softly. People are about to get shot, bearer bonds are about to be stolen and, of course, an armored car just got jacked up, but Michael Mann, writer and director, still pays attention to the tiniest of details, over and over, throughout, the way one seemingly random word can mean all the difference, the way a pair of sunglasses removed translates that someone is not to be trifled with, and turns them into poetry. None of his contemporaries and few of his predecessors, if I may be so bold, capture the intimate, intricate details quite like Mann, nor shape their stories so not even the slightest indispensable stroke is missing. Is it any wonder then that this sprawling saga of Cops and Robbers focuses on two protagonists who are obsessed with the details?

The Robber is Neil McCauley (Robert DeNiro) whose attitudes toward female companionship and home furniture are identical (“When I get around to it”). He sees mostly everything, misses much of nothing, and adheres to a rigorous personal code so infamous that the James Franco character in Date Night actually quoted it. He can be gentlemanly, so gentlemanly that in the midst of a robbery he declares “We want to hurt no one” but he can he also be ruthless, so ruthless that only seconds after proclaiming they want to hurt no one he smashes a bank employee’s jaw. The Cop is Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), demonstrative, a bit vulgar, compulsive gum chewer, and passing his third wife Justine (Diane Venora) on the “downslope” of their marriage partly because he says – actually says to his wife – that he needs his angst.

McCauley’s crew is high-tech and tight-knit but admits a fifth man for the armored car take down that does not go down quite right and results in three murders that results in Hanna and his team taking the case. They seem nearly as high-tech and tight-knit and just as obsessive which, of course, yields an epic tug-of-war. In one breathless passage of time about an hour in, the film reverses its tracks three times. As Hanna closes in on his target to make the bust of the century one minor slip-up causes McCauley to pull the plug on a particular heist – leading to the most dramatic face off in cinematic history in which the two men facing off are not in the same room – which reverses when McCauley and crew cleverly unmask the identity of their pursuers which reverses when Hanna tracks down McCauley on the L.A. freeway and asks, gun nestled firmly in hand, in that memorable Pacino-an, “What do ya say I buy ya a cup of coffee?”

From the opening credits revealing the actors’ names the audience knows all along that Cop and Robber must come face to face, not simply because they are Cop and Robber but because they are Pacino and DeNiro, perhaps the two greatest actors of their era (and at the time of the film’s release not recognized as the slumming ex-heavyweight champs they are now), and this is the first time they had ever shared the screen in the same film. Mann sets the scene in an entirely ordinary coffee shop because, as he would explain, there could be nothing to distract from the simple fact these two were squaring off on the cinematic hardwood. And it is spellbinding, both in acting and in writing and in the way the larger message becomes apparent, the fact that these two men are the same and need one another as badly as they need to eliminate one another.

But what might most be telling about this unforgettable passage is that while just about any other filmmaker, established or not, Oscar winner or never nominated, would have made it the point, the whole point and nothing but the point, Michael Mann presents it as but one more detail – however monumental – in the narrative. For such two larger-than-life figures at the core, "Heat" is about so much more than just hard-headed guys on the prowl.

McCauley’s crew includes Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer), a gambling junkie, married to Charlene (Ashley Judd), who have a young son, Dominic, who at times, sadly, disturbingly, seems more like a chip on a gaming table than an actual living, breathing human being. Their first scene transitions, jarringly, from lovey-dovey to full-blown argument as Chris breaks household items just to break household items and storms out. But in his next scene with McCauley, functioning as mentor, Chris says, quietly but firmly, in those of those majestic Mann lines that is age-old but so relevant: “For me the sun rises and sets with her, man.” And that’s it. That’s all we need to know. That’s why in the end, after it’s all gone terribly wrong, after he has a chance to make a clean escape, Chris goes after Charlene anyway, which leads to Charlene on a balcony and, in an instant, even after all the shit he’s put her through, waving Chris away. It’s miniscule, barely there, wouldn’t even register to most guys wearing the headphones and watching the dailies and sending interns for lattes, but in "Heat" this lone wave of the hand, coupled with Judd’s and Kilmer's expressive pain, wrenches your gut like real life.

Michael Churrido (Tom Sizemore) might be the most emblematic at all, the endless ex-con, in and out of prison, who has settled into the most normal life possible under the guidance of McCauley, finding a potential wife with a couple kids he seems to love, putting away money, but upon finding himself with a chance to walk away – in Sizemore’s 30 greatest seconds of screen time ‘ever’, including everything in Saving Private Ryan – declaring instead, “For me, the action is the juice.”

Is the action the juice for McCauley? Well, he does finally get around to female companionship when he hooks up with the polite but incredibly shy Eady (Amy Brenneman) who approaches him at a coffee shop, trying to Meet Cute with him even though, in her own words, “I’m not very good at meeting people.” They make a strange but strangely appealing couple, two kindred spirits in the terrifying realm of lonliness, a fact which will eventually pit McCauley one on one with his personal code.

Even then there are two more characters perhaps generally described as minor who are anything but. Don Breeman (Dennis Haysbert) is another ex-con, out on parole and taking a job as a line cook for a thankless, crooked taskmaster (Bud Cort) whose connection to the rest of the film’s mammoth story seems uncertain but will eventually fall into place. This subplot could have been forced, existing solely out of necessity, but instead in a manner of four scenes becomes a full-fledged, tragic arc that crystallizes Who We Are is What We Will Always Be and comes to a head in a sequence with no music score between Haysbert and DeNiro – “One answer. Right now. Yes or no.” – in which the camera captures a multitude of angles of the two men as it all hangs in the balance. A nothing moment becomes absolutely everything.

And then there is Lauren Gustafson (Natalie Portman), Justine’s teenage daughter, the Alice Munro of Heat, needy and edgy, primarily because she is neglected by her real father, who we never see, as well as neglected by Justine and by Vincent, too, as she sinks further and further into this abyss no one seems to recognize is there until her stepfather sees her sitting all alone on a bus bench in the middle of nowhere, rocking back and forth, and picks her up. The expression on Pacino’s face is only for a second but in that second we realize he is the only one able to recognize what is going and what might be about to happen except, of course, all he has is “what I’m going after” and Lauren is forgotten until it is nearly too late.

Yes, yes, yes, Hanna and McCauley will stalk each other with guns (notice how Mann’s script makes mention of the hotel as being the Airport Marquis – details, details, details), yet I can’t help but feel there is so much more to that climactic moment of the Conqueror taking the Vanquished’s hand as the stately music score swells. He got what he was going after but you hope and pray that what he’s really thinking of is that little girl back at the hospital who might survive but still needs help to live and, thus, that when he lets go of the other guy’s hand maybe, just maybe, he will let go of his angst, too.

Eleven years after "Heat" Michael Mann made the cinematic version of "Miami Vice" and in it there is a shot where the Colin Farrell character, a vice detective on the verge of going undercover, and his associates are talking with an informant and as they do, Farrell, briefly, looks out the informant’s condo window at the ocean which is just out there, you know, being the ocean. His eyes narrow as if he’s looking really hard at something and then he turns away.

In "Heat" there is a shot where McCauley, after he has met with his main man (Jon Voight, Method to the max), returns home and goes to the window and the camera focuses, intensely, on the right side of his face before the focus flips and we realize he is staring out at the ocean which is just out there, you know, being the ocean. Essentially it is the same shot in two different films. What’s out there? What do they see? I don’t think we’re meant to know. I think it’s something we can’t see, something we could never hope to see, something we wouldn’t understand if we could see.

I think it’s something only Michael Mann can see.