Produced by the A&E cable network, filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev's documentary details the sexual-abuse scandal that rocked the campus of Pennsylvania State University in November 2011. The investigation led to the firing of the most successful college football coach in history, Joe Paterno (who, in a double shocker, suddenly died of cancer in two months) and life imprisonment for the convicted perpetrator, assistant coach Jerry Sandusky. Bar-Lev approaches the case less as a straightforward Court TV chronicle and more as an ethnographic portrait of a community shaken to its roots, with a chorus of eyewitnesses/interviewees that include Sandusky's adopted son. Penn State was a gridiron-monomaniac mini-society in which, as one observer says, Paterno was basically God, while his protégé Sandusky could be equated with Jesus Christ. If there is any sense of injustice here, it is not meant to exonerate Sandusky (who appears in an adoring, pre-scandal network-TV profile, surrounded by young boys), but rather to suggest that the anti-Paterno backlash went overboard, with laborers tearing down a campus monument to Coach Joe, while sports authorities strike his unmatched string of wins from the records. The tragedy, we're told, is that Paterno "ran a clean program," especially by money-crazed modern college-sports standards, and did not deserve his legacy to be vengefully erased. Highly recommended. Aud: C, P. (C. Cassady)
Happy Valley
(2014) 98 min. DVD: $179: high schools & public libraries; $349: colleges & universities. DRA. Good Docs (avail. from www.gooddocs.net). PPR. Volume 30, Issue 1
Happy Valley
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