Movie Review: Paterno

Paterno *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Barry Levinson.

Written by: Debora Cahn and John C. Richards.

Starring: Al Pacino (Joe Paterno), Riley Keough (Sara Ganim), Kathy Baker (Sue Paterno), Greg Grunberg (Scott Paterno), Annie Parisse (Mary Kay Paterno), Ben Cook (Aaron Fisher), Jim Johnson (Jerry Sandusky), Peter Jacobson (David Newhouse), Larry Mitchell (Jay Paterno), Darren Goldstein (Mike McQueary), Kristen Bush (Dawn Fisher), Sean Cullen (Dan McGinn), Steve Coulter (Tim Curley), Tom Kemp (Graham Spanier), William Hill (Tom Bradley), Michael Mastro (Guido D'Elia), Josh Mowrey (Ron Vanderlinden).

 

Al Pacino gives another of his great late career performances as disgraced former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno. The film is basically a study in denial, as it documents a few months in the life of Paterno following the indictment of his former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky on multiple charges of child molestation. It was a scandal that rocked Penn State, and as it unfolded, and more and more information came out, and it became clear that so many – including Paterno himself – knew something, and did nothing, it just became bigger. Paterno dedicated his life to coaching at Penn State – he spent decades there, refusing other job offers for more money, and was basically treated as a God on campus. People didn’t just see him as a great football coach, but as a great educator, a great humanitarian, and a great man. But how could Paterno not do more than he did with the information he had?

 

As a movie, Paterno would probably work best as part of a double bill with Amir Bar-Lev’s great documentary Happy Valley (2014), was chronicled the Sandusky scandal, but more really the fallout on campus afterwards – where it seemed more people were upset with how Paterno was treated than they were about the Sandusky scandal. You could also read some of the great, Pulitzer Prize winning work done by Sara Ganim, the Patriot-News reporter, who broke the story months before the indictments – which was ignored – but kept on pushing, and pursuing more and more leads and survivors as the story finally did break nationally. Ganim is played, in a very good performance here by Riley Keough – who is quickly becoming a favorite actress of mine with her work in films like American Honey, It Comes at Night and Logan Lucky. Either of those will give you a bigger, more complete picture of what happened.

 

What Paterno does is take you behind the closed door of the Paterno home during that time. When it comes out that Paterno had known about at least one allegation a decade before – because another assistant coach reported to Paterno that he had seen Sandusky raping a boy in the shower, and Paterno did nothing except report it to his superiors – the next day, as to not spoil their weekend – the media attention on Paterno heated up. His weekly press conference was cancelled, a weak statement followed, and soon the legend had announced his retirement at the end of the season – and after that, was fired outright. Since Paterno died of cancer a few months later, he never really did publicly address anything.

 

What the film does then is show Paterno as he it’s behind closed doors, with his family, still actively refusing to engage with what is happening outside – and trying to convince everyone that it had nothing to do with him. He’s there to coach football – and he has a game to prepare for. He doesn’t read the indictments that come down, doesn’t want to talk about them, pushes aside any suggestion that perhaps he could have and should have, done more. He reported it to his superiors, what else was he supposed to do? This is all just a distraction from the important thing – football. Can’t he just get back to doing that?

 

Pacino is great in the film, especially when he is quiet. He has done a few of these HBO biopics movies in the last few years – he won an Emmy for playing Jack Kevorkian for Paterno director Barry Levinson in You Don’t Know Jack, and like in that film, he has an opportunity to go big here, but instead goes quieter – and it’s more effective (he didn’t have that chance in David Mamet’s Phil Spector, the other HBO project – which is perhaps why it’s clearly the weakest). Pacino doesn’t really try and do a Paterno impression here – but instead goes for something deeper – something that was perhaps missing in Paterno that allowed him to compartmentalize everything.

 

What’s most impressive about the movie is how it basically shows Paterno is pain from beginning to end – and yet doesn’t encourage or engender any sympathy for the man. Everything he goes through in the film he brings on himself. The movie made the choice to essentially be an interior study of Paterno, and thus, not give the full dimension of what happened – and that has its positives and negatives – but for Pacino, this is a triumph.

Movie Review: The Wizard of Lies

The Wizard of Lies *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Barry Levinson.

Written by: Sam Levinson & Samuel Baum & John Burnham Schwartz based on the book by Diana Henriques.

Starring: Robert De Niro (Bernard Madoff), Michelle Pfeiffer (Ruth Madoff), Alessandro Nivola (Mark Madoff), Hank Azaria (Frank DiPascali), Nathan Darrow (Andrew Madoff), Sydney Gayle (Emily Madoff), Lily Rabe (Catherine Hooper), Kristen Connolly (Stephanie Madoff), Kathrine Narducci (Eleanor Squillari), Steve Coulter (Martin London), Michael Kostroff (Peter Madoff).

 

Before talking about The Wizard of Lies, a fine HBO docudrama about Bernie Madoff, allow me to say aloud that I find it odd that HBO, who in many ways helped invent so called “prestige TV” with The Wire and The Sopranos and Oz (among others), and has continued to innovate (both successfully, and not so much) in their shows since then, has essentially been cranking out the same type of made-for-HBO movie for decades now. I don’t say this necessarily as an insult – I like the type of docudramas they’ve made over in the years – with films like Indictment: The McMartin Trial (1995), Don King: Only in America (1997) and Path to War (2002) being particular favorites. Yet, while on the series side, HBO is taking chances, on the film side, they continue to make these historical docudramas – some very good (You Don’t Know Jack), some bad (Phil Spector), some somewhere in between (All the Way). The Wizard of Lies is essentially a good movie – it contains two great performances, and does a decent job of recounting the life and crimes of Bernie Madoff – yet I cannot help but wonder why HBO hasn’t done a better job filling in the gap of the disappearing middle class of movies – like say Netflix and Amazon have. But I digress, that really isn’t The Wizard of Lies fault – it was just a thought I had while watching the film, and thinking that aside from the time period, you could have made this exact film in 1995 on HBO.

 

In the film, Robert DeNiro plays Madoff – the well-respected financial guru, who it turned out had been running the largest Ponzi scheme Wall Street had ever seen, scamming billions of dollars out of his clients, none of whom ever had a clue. I do wish that the film had perhaps dived a little more into how Madoff did it, but I also understand I’m probably in the minority who wanted more details about financial transactions, so perhaps director Barry Levinson and company were right to basically stick to the family story. This is not a film about Madoff’s victims – it’s about how his crimes effected those closest to him, who the film takes at face value in that it never questions their own story that they didn’t know what was going on.

 

DeNiro is undeniably one of the greatest actors of all time, but also undeniably, hasn’t always seemed that interested in doing great work in the past, oh, two decades or so – with the occasional great performance (Stone, Silver Linings Playbook or his great directorial effort The Good Shepherd) being lost in a sea of mediocrity. Here, he is quite good, and makes an interesting choice with Madoff – making him into a blank faced, mostly bland psychopath. He doesn’t raise his voice very often, he isn’t giving “Greed is Good” speeches like Gordon Gekko, or going insane like Jordan Belfort – he just calmly, rationally steals all your money. You cannot even say he’s doing it for his family, because he screws up their lives as well – he says he did it all himself, and they knew nothing, but as we see in flashbacks, even when his sons wanted to leave his company, strike out on their own, he berates them into staying – essentially sealing their fate. This is not a deep dive by DeNiro – who keeps his understanding of Madoff on a surface level, but he implies that the surface level is all there is to Madoff.

 

That does leave the emotional heavy lifting in the film to the other characters. As his wife, Michelle Pfeiffer is excellent – she isn’t a typical trophy wife (for one thing, she’s been with Bernie since they were poor teenagers), but she clearly didn’t want to know anything about what Bernie did at work or why – her priority was her family – and the money – and when she loses it all, she has nothing left. Pfeiffer is so good here, it really makes you wish she’d work more often (this is the first time I’ve seen her since 2013). Also quite good is Alessandro Nivola as their younger son – the one who admires their father more than anything, who takes all of his crap, and is destroyed by the revelations. Nathan Darrow isn’t as effective as the older Madoff son – mainly because he has a more reserved role.

 

The Wizard of Lies was directed by Barry Levinson – the Oscar winning filmmaker of Rain Man, and other fine films of the 1980s and 1990s (my personal favorite is probably the Iraq War satire Wag the Dog with DeNiro from 1997). Levinson has always been a smart, middle of the road filmmaker – and there’s no difference here. The Wizard of Lies knows precisely what it is, and what it wants to do – and it delivers. It’s a little strange to me that HBO continues to churn these films out, with seemingly no real ambition to grow, but they know what they’re doing, and they do it well.

Movie Review: The Humbling

The Humbling
Directed by: Barry Levinson.
Written by: Buck Henry and Michal Zebede based on the novel by Philip Roth.
Starring: Al Pacino (Simon Axler), Greta Gerwig (Pegeen Mike Stapleford), Kyra Sedgwick (Louise Trenner), Dianne Wiest (Peegan’s Mother), Charles Grodin (Jerry), Nina Arianda (Sybil), Dan Hedaya  (Asa), Dylan Baker (Doctor).

Philip Roth is one of the greatest American writers of his generation, but The Humbling is not one of his great novels. It is a parade of misery for its main character that just adds one piece of horrible news after another until you cannot believe it and just start chuckling. It is, however, one of the easier books of Roth’s career to turn into a movie as it really is a rather simple story – which is perhaps why the filmmakers behind this film decided to do this film and not one of his masterpieces. And the filmmakers are smart enough to know that Roth’s parade of misery would need to be lighten a little to be made into a movie – and they have essentially turned it into a black comedy. The best thing the film has going for it is Al Pacino in the lead role of Simon Axler – an aging actor who has a humiliating moment on stage and retires from acting. Pacino, unlike many of his contemporaries, seems to still want to challenge himself in his old age – and he dives headlong into the role. He’s far better than the movie itself, and keeps it all interesting.

In the film, Axler falls off the stage while performing Shakespeare, and then, alone in his Connecticut home he tries to kill himself with a shotgun – and fails. He checks himself into a mental hospital for a month – where he meets the even crazier Sybil (Nina Arianda) who confesses her dark secrets to him – while all he can think about is whether or not she’s performing, and critiquing her interpretation of her life. Back in his home, there is a knock on the door, and on the other side is Pegeen (Greta Gerwig) – the daughter of his old friends who he hasn’t seen since she was 10 (in the novel she’s 40, I’m assuming she’s supposed to be a few years younger in the film). She always had a crush on Simon – and decides now is the time to act on it – despite the fact that she has spent the last 16 years living as lesbian. Soon she has moved herself in, and taken over his life.

Pacino is excellent in the role that takes him for suicidal despair to physical comedy craziness and everything in between. He may not exactly like all the insanity that Pegeen has introduced into his life – but at least it’s never boring. Whether it’s her former lover, the stalker, or another former lover, who has just had a sex change operation, or her angry, bitter parents, or other women that Pegeen brings to the house, his life in no longer the pit of despair it was. What Pegeen wants is for Simon to start acting again – and since he’s spending all of his money on her, he is pretty much going to need to anyway.

The movie is constantly engaging and interesting on a scene by scene level. You’re never quite sure what to expect, as the movie swings wildly from one extreme to the other, and sometimes includes Simon’s delusions, which he (and the audience) are never quite sure if they are real or not. Pacino is at the center of practically every scene, and holds our interest. The supporting cast is all in fine form – especially Dianne Wiest, who gets her best scene in years late in the movie, and Nina Arianda, who is completely unhinged, but in a pleasant way, as Sybil.

What holds the movie back however is the character of Pegeen. I don’t really fault Gerwig here – she gives it her all – but the movie, like the novel, doesn’t really know who she is, or why she’s doing what she’s doing it. She seems to exist only to drive Axler more insane, as every time he agrees to do what she wants him to do, she immediately undermines him, and drives him in the opposite direction. She is really more of a caricature of a typical Roth – or Woody Allen – woman who never becomes a believable character in the least.

This somewhat diminishes the movie, which nevertheless remains interesting and entertaining throughout – and one of the few times I would say that a movie is marked improvement over the novel that inspired it. It’s fun to see Pacino continuing to push himself, well after most of his 1970s colleagues have decided to either call it a career or else just phone in their performances. The Humbling is not a great movie – but it has a great performance at its core.

My Mini-TIFF Wrap-Up

If you read my mini-TIFF preview a few weeks ago, you know that unlike most years, I wasn’t able to do a weeklong movie binge this year – having a 6 month old baby at home will do that to a guy. I was only able to attend two days on the weekend, and I decided to go to the second weekend, instead of the first – and I have to say the experience was wonderful. When you go early in the festival, the media and celebrities are all over everything, everything gets delayed and the whole thing is chaos – enjoyable chaos, but chaos just the same. When you go the second weekend, the media has all but left, there are few if any celebrities still around, the whole thing runs smoothly. The lineups are shorter, the theaters slightly less packed, everything starts on time, and you get into the theaters way earlier. In short, when you go the second weekend, it’s all about the movies not the hype – and I highly suggest anyone who can to do that next year. I know I will.

Anyway, onto the movies themselves. My 8 film weekend started with The Humbling directed by Barry Levinson, co-written by Buck Henry based on Philip Roth’s novel, and starring Al Pacino in the lead role as Simon Axler – an aging actor, who falls off the stage during a performance, and decides to retire. After a stay in a mental hospital, he retires to his large house in Connecticut. It’s there he meets – or re-meets I guess – Pegeen (Greta Gerwig) – the daughter of his old friends who he hasn’t seen since she was 10, decades ago. She always had a crush on him, and that has stopped all these years later – despite the fact that she’s now a lesbian. The filmmakers wisely turn one of Roth’s least novels – which is really a misery tour that borders on the comedic – into a full blown comedy. Pacino gives the role his all – and it’s nice to see that at least one of the great actors from the 1970s is still willing to challenge himself and not just coast (like DeNiro). It’s a broad performance, but Pacino hits all the right notes – and the supporting cast, from Kyra Sedgwick to Dianne Wiest to Dan Hedaya to Charles Grodin – all hit the right notes in rather small roles. A particular highlight is Nina Arianda as Sybil, a woman he meets in the mental hospital, who thinks Simon can kill her husband because he has experience killing people in the movies. The problem with the movie is that it never really figures out who Pegeen is – despite a valiant effort on the part of Gerwig, who plays like a caricature of a typical Roth woman (or actually, perhaps a Woody Allen woman) – although since the movie segues back and forth between reality and fantasy, perhaps that’s intentional. Still, it seems like her whole purpose is to destroy Simon – or at least come along and move the plot in whatever way it needs to go, instead of being an actual character. It’s still one of the better movies Levinson has made in a while – and one of the best performances Pacino has given not for HBO in a decade.

Another movie star showed up in Time Out of Mind directed by Oren Moverman. This was Richard Gere, who plays the homeless George in what is mainly a plotless movie. What little plot there is involves Gere trying to reconnect with the daughter he abandoned (Jena Malone) and navigating the bureaucracy of the shelter system, and the Government, as he tries to get some proof of who he is (he has no ID). Mainly though, Moverman is interested in re-creating the day-to-day life of a homeless man – often shooting Gere from a distance, observing him as most of the people he passes takes no notice of him. It’s a fascinating film, with a great performance by Gere, who has never disappeared this far into a role before, nor done something that doesn’t utilize his natural charm to this degree. It’s also kind of dull to be honest – but still well worth seeing to see both Moverman and Gere take an interesting step in a new direction for their careers.

I ended up seeing three blood soaked foreign films, of varying degrees of quality. The worst was Shrew’s Nest from Spain, directed by Juanfer Andres and Esteban Roel about a pair of sisters living in an apartment building. The older one never leaves the apartment, where she makes a living making dresses, and the younger one – who is more beautiful, has just turned 18, and may want out soon. When there upstairs neighbor falls down the stairs, breaking his leg outside their apartment, the older sister takes him in – he’s grateful of first as he was planning on disappearing for a while anyway – but soon he discovers she’s basically planning on keeping him in bed forever, Misery-style. The first half of the movie is restrained, but also kind of dull – because it’s clear everyone is holding back REALLY BIG secrets that will eventually be revealed. The second half of the film is bonkers, with the revelations and corpses piling up every five minutes or so in a blood soaked finale, which requires pretty much every character to behave in completely unbelievable ways for the sake of its “shocking” finale that was telegraphed almost from the beginning. It was only 90 minutes, but felt much longer.

There was also Fires on the Plain by director Shin’ya Tsukamoto, a remake of Kon Ichikawa’s 1959 WWII classic about dehumanization. Tsukamoto’s film hits some of the same themes, but does so in a much more blood soaked way – including a massacre in the middle of the movie which is as chaotic, violent, bloody and disturbing as any scene of its kind – until it goes slightly too far. The same can be said of the movie, which is a weird mixture of art-house sensibilities – with long portions with little or no dialogue, with the main character on his own, mixed with the splatter film violence that Tsukamoto is most known for. The effect is surprisingly effective and disturbing – but of course, falls well short of Ichikawa’s classic, which was pretty much inevitable.

The best of the blood soaked triad was Alleluia directed by Fabrice du Welz based on the infamous Honeymoon Killers, who have had several movies made about them in the past. In the film, a normal woman – a mother of young woman – falls for a womanizing conman, and even after she learns his secrets, wants nothing else than to be with him. She poses as her sister as he seduces three other rich women for their money – but completely loses it every time she sleeps with them, leading to bloody murder and dismemberment – and even a surreal musical number. The film never really attempts to answer the question of why – why this normal woman fell so hard for the conman, or why the conman lets her keep screwing up his plans – but as a portrait of obsessive love and violence its damn good – particularly the insane performance by Lola Duenas. The film is at its best when it’s at its most unhinged and surreal – and Du Welz goes for broke.

I suppose the mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows directed by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi could also be described as a blood soaked foreign film – there are literally geysers of blood throughout the film, and it is from New Zealand, but unlike the other three films its goes for comedy more than anything else – and the results are delightful and hilarious – it won the People’s Choice for Midnight Madness, and is a cult film in the making. The film follows four vampires who are also flatmates in New Zealand, who have to have meetings to ensure everyone is doing their fair share of the chores, and other such issues. Waititi is wonderful as Viago, a “former dandy” who is a little obsessive about cleanliness – he asks the others to put down some paper or towels before killing a victim, so as not to get blood everywhere. Clement is even better as an older vampire – once known as Vladislav the Poker. The film plays with every vampire movie cliché imaginable – from Nosferatu to Twilight – and has great fun the entire time. In a festival where almost everything else I saw was heavy, violent and disturbing, this one was a pure joy.

The best film I saw was The Look of Silence, Joshua Oppenheimer’s companion piece to his previous documentary The Act of Killing – a film that left me stunned two years ago at TIFF, where it completely surprised me as I had no idea what to expect. In this film, Oppenheimer accompanies Abi, an optometrist, as he goes to visit the men who killed his older brother during the 1965 Indonesian “cleansing” of Communists. Oppenehimer returns, repeatedly, to Abi simply watching the footage of the killers as the recount, without a hint of remorse, what they did to his brother – and to his two aged parents – the mother who still cries for her lost son, to his father, who is sick and somewhat demented, but still sad. When he confronts his brother’s killers he encounters a series of denials, excuses and threats. They don’t want to stir up the past – at least not with the family of one of their victims, as they seem to have no problem revealing to Oppenheimer what they did, and no remorse for it either – as we saw in The Act of Killing. The children of his brother’s killers are perhaps even more interesting than the killers themselves – one makes excuses for her father – telling Abi he’s old and senile and doesn’t remember much, even though this follows his rather precise re-telling of what he did. Two sons of a man who wrote a book – complete with drawings – of what he did don’t want to hear anything about, and say they knew nothing. “Can’t we just all get along like the military dictatorship taught us?” one asks Abi. All Abi really wants is to see some sort of remorse from his brothers killers – and it’s the one thing they seemingly refuse to give. As a chilling scene in his son’s classroom makes clear, Indonesia still hasn’t come to terms to the reality of what was done – and they don’t seem to much care either. The movie doesn’t have the same hook as The Act of Killing – killers re-enacting their crimes in the style of various Hollywood films – but is even more devastating. I’m not sure if Oppenheimer made the film is response to some of the criticism the last one received, but if he did it refutes it brilliantly. This may be even better than The Act of Killing – which was the best documentary I had seen in years.

I ended my TIFF experience with Goodbye to Language 3-D by Jean-Luc Godard. Any regular readers know that I am ambivalent at best about almost everything Godard has made since Weekend way back in 1967 – and I have downright hated some of them, like his last feature Film Socialism. But Goodbye to Language is my favorite Godard film is years – its more playful and less didactic than Film Socialism, even though it is definitely related to that film. The film is more accessible than that film as well – even if I still think I only understood about half of it. But even when the film left me confused, it was brilliantly filmed in 3-D – giving us images that no other filmmaker would think of doing. Godard is experimenting with 3-D – and gives us some amazing images – most notably a moment when the screen splits, the camera revolves, and then comes together again. For the most part, I am indifferent at best to 3-D – since it became the norm for large scale movies, the only ones I think truly utilized it well are Gravity, Hugo and Avatar – the rest are merely unnecessary or distracting. While Goodbye to Language isn’t the best 3-D movie I have ever seen, it is certainly the most unique use of 3-D I have ever seen – and perhaps the thing the technology needed the most – a true innovator trying to do something completely different with it. I’m not as in love with the film as many are – it comes back to that only understanding half of it thing – but I’m glad I saw it at TIFF, as I am well aware that I may never get another chance to see it on the big screen in 3-D the way it is meant to be seen. If you have the opportunity, you should definitely seize it.

So that’s it for TIFF for another year. Hopefully next year, I.’ll be back to another week long trip. But this year, despite how short my stay at TIFF was, I had a great time, some saw great films – and isn’t that what TIFF is supposed to be all about.

TV Movie Review: You Don't Know Jack

You Don’t Know Jack ****
Directed by: Barry Levinson
Written By: Adam Mazer.
Starring: Al Pacino (Dr. Jack Kevorkian), Danny Huston (Geoffrey Fieger), Susan Sarandon (Janet Good), John Goodman (Neal Nicol), Brenda Vaccaro (Margo Janus), Eric Lange (John Skrzynski), James Urbaniak (Jack Lessenberry), Danielle McKee (Dorothy Lessenberry).

There are many actors of Al Pacino’s age and stature who have simply grown bored and unambitious with their choices – Robert DeNiro and Gene Hackman come to mind. But Pacino has not yet given up – he seems to still hunger for great roles, and working with great directors, and is willing to go outside the normal channels to find these projects for himself. Yes, in the last decade Pacino has made some bad choices, but he has also made some great ones, and for the second time this decade he has gone to HBO (the first being his brilliant performance as Roy Cohn in Mike Nichols Angels in America) to find a role worthy of his talent. As Dr. Jack Kevorkian in Barry Levinson’s new film You Don’t Know Jack, Pacino is given one of the best roles of his late period – and he doesn’t let the opportunity pass.

Everyone knows who Jack Kevorkian is. The infamous “Dr. Death” helped over 130 terminally ill patients commit suicide in the 1990s. He had his medical license revoked and went on trail numerous times – being acquitted at each of them until his final one – and became the face and voice of the assisted suicide movement. To some he was a godsend, helping their loved ones end their suffering, but to others he was little more than one of the prolific serial killers of all time. The new HBO film You Don’t Know Jack looks behind the headlines at the man who felt driven to do what he did.

Kevorkian is not the most charming, charismatic or cheerful spokesperson that the Right to Die movement could have had. What he was, was the only doctor willing to do what he believed in, which was to help people end their suffering. When he first starts with his “suicide machine”, he knows that they will probably come after him and try and put him in jail for it, and he doesn’t care. He had already retired from his career as a pathologist, he never married, he has no kids, and other than his sister Margo (Brenda Vaccaro), he has no family. He doesn’t even have that much money – what the hell are they going to take away from him, other than his freedom, and he doesn’t care about that. Most of his family died in the Armenian Genocide, and then when he came to America, he had to watch his mother die a slow, painful death. He didn’t just do it in spite of the fact he knew that they would come after him – he did it precisely because he knew they would. His downfall would be because of this hubris – when he pushed things too far, believing himself to be invincible, and eventually forcing the prosecutors, who had long since stopped trying to convict him of anything, to go after him with everything they had.

Pacino carries the movie with his amazing performance. He confronts Kevorkian, with all his contradictions, his ego and his humanity, and creates one of the most memorable characters of the year out of him. It is easy to watch the film and not like Kevorkian very much, but you have to admire his moxie and commitment – not many people would be willing to do what he did knowing the potential consequences. Near the end of the movie, when it becomes clear that Kevorkian is in way over his head in his final trial – where, for the first time, he actually injected the patient himself, instead of letting them control the suicide machine, and he decides to represent himself, you cannot help but feel sorry for the poor bastard. By then, everyone except Kevorkian knows that he is screwed, but he keeps right on trying anyway.

But Pacino is not the only good performance in the film. Danny Huston is excellent as his longtime lawyer, who takes all of his cases pro bono – not out of kindness, but because he knows it will be a great way to make a name for himself, and he does. And yet, even you even like Huston, who does come to genuinely care about Kevorkian, and becomes increasingly frustrated during that final trial when he is kept on the outside. Susan Sarandon is quite good as well as a Right to Die advocate who comes to befriend Kevorkian – but will later need his services. John Goodman gives the type of performance he always does – that is supplying great support for the leads – never flashy, but always wonderful. Best of all is Brenda Vaccaro, given perhaps the best role of her career as Marjo, Kevorkian’s sister, and she carries her part well. While everyone else in the film likes Kevorkian, or at least what he stands for and what he can do for their cause, she is the only one who genuinely loves him – and stands by him no matter what happens. The supporting players who play Kevorkian’s “patients” and their families all feel genuine.

The film was directed by Barry Levinson – Oscar winner for Rain Man, who in the past few years has struggled to make a decent theatrical movie – failing with titles like Envy, Man of the Year and What Just Happened? Here though, he does a great job of staying out of the way of the story, and simply letting it unfold around us. He does some wonderful things with the “videos” the patients make, but generally he stays in the background – which is how it should work with this type of TV movie.

I am sure that the people who are opposed to Kevorkian and his views will not be happy with the film. It is rather one sided in its view, and doesn’t give much time or space for the arguments against assisted suicide, while it spends a lot of time arguing for it. Since I agree with assisted suicide (it seems to be that I have no right to tell people who are in pain and want to end their lives with dignity that they can’t), it didn’t bother me very much. Besides, the film does not paint Kevorkian as a saint or angel of mercy. It looks at him, flaws and all, and asks you to judge what he did based on his actions. Reasonable people can disagree on an issue as complex and fraught with legal and moral issues as assisted suicide. Hopefully everyone can watch You Don’t Know Jack with an open mind.