The theme is right there in the opening shot: a pilgrim’s parade of trucks and RVs, winding their way through bucolic countryside on their way to tailgate before a Penn State football game. But oh, what’s that in the lower left of frame? Why, it’s a row of trashcans and portable toilets, besmirching our pastoral fantasy with the ugly reality of our dirty business. The facts of the Jerry Sandusky sex abuse case are pretty well known: a Penn State football coach who worked with troubled youth turned out to be contributing to those troubles. Someone told revered head coach Joe Paterno about one such event; Paterno passed the report up the chain; nothing happened. When the story broke, Penn State fired Paterno, Paterno died shortly thereafter, and the NCAA made an example of both coach and school, vacating his past wins and crippling the Penn State football program. In relating the story and its effect on the titular region surrounding the school, director Amir Bar-Lev (My Kid Could Paint That) casts his net wide rather than deep. He combines news clips and emotionally charged up-close footage with interviews from all sides, pulling in Paterno’s family, Sandusky’s adopted son, a lawyer for the victims, the artist behind a local mural depicting both Sandusky and Paterno, etc. Worthwhile as a portrait of a community convulsed by horror: taking it in, working it out, messily groping its way through the muck for a way to endure. You may cringe. You may sympathize. You may cringe at your own sympathy. (2014) — Matthew Lickona
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