AFI Fest Review: Happy Valley

I'm an Ohio State Buckeye.  When I see someone wearing OSU gear aroud Los Angeles, I don't even have a chocie: I yell "O-H!" as if it's a reflex, and the response comes just as automatically.  I'm not even a big football fan.  I went to my share of games my first couple years of college, then lefft the Shoe until graduation.  But going to that school, and being among the sea of screaming scarlet and grey instills something in you.  I hate Michigan with a passion, despite my not caring.  The band is really the best damn in the land.  The stadium-wide spelling chant is the kind of thing that sends chills up your spine: I'm part of something.

So even as a non-fan, I understand our country's reverence of college football.  It's perfectly captured in Amir Bar-Lev's Happy Valley, a documentary about the Penn State sex scandal.  I remember news of the scandal breaking.  I was still at school, and our game against Penn State was still to come that season.  I won't soon forget the hideous things students said about that team, that schoo, that town.  And neither will the residents of State College, PA or the wider nation of Nittany Lions.  Bar-Lev's film reveals a town in turmoils, a nationwide family of fans frustrated a the shadow everything Penn State-related now falls under.

As a document of the events - Jerry Sandusky being charged with numerous counts of sexual abuse, Joe Paterno being implicated, the release of the Freeh report, and the aftermath - Happy Valley is thorough.  Bar-Lev bragged in a post-screening Q&A that there is not a shred of new information in the film.  He isn't seeking to complicate the investigation, to prove things that haven't been previously proven, or to shake up what we think of St. Joe, Sandusky, and the rest of those touched by these events.  It's no surprise, then, that Happy Valley is as even-handed a documentary as I've seen, laying every card on the table for the audience to decipher and digest as they will.

Bar-Lev cuts to the heart of America's incredible obsession with college football.  We see the pilgimmage to the stadium, the massive pre-game tailgating, and the uniforms of the faithful: faces painted, pom-poms shaking, mouths perpetually open in cheers and jeers.  After the allegations come out, the game becomes something more, the main event to a candlelight vigil appetizer, a bunch of sweaty twenty-somethings shouldering the metaphorical burden that doesn't belong in an arena.  The most lively interview subject in the film, a recent Penn State graduate named Tyler Estright, recalls being scolded for yelling at the Nebraska quarterback at that first post-Paterno game.  Too often, we want to make the things that mean the most to us actually mean something.

Happy Valley also reveals our collective fickleness.  We build up our heroes only to tear them down and find new ones to cling to.  History is revised as punishment, as though facts are mutable.  A mural artist in State College continually returns to his iconic work, battling with what it means to add a halo over Paterno's likeness, or to remove it.  We Americans are extremists: we either love someone or we hate them.  At a riot, a student wants the media to note that in addition to cheering on Paterno, they're also yelling "Fuck Sandusky" because Sandusky "deserves to burn in hell."  Perhaps we are unable, at least collectively, to think that someone was a great man who did terrible things.  Any mark tarnishes the perceived sainthood, and thus must be denied, even in the face of cold, hard facts, those easily changed and ignored things.  As the film notes, these fans have their energy and their reverence at the ready; they just need someone to attach them to.