Wherever possible I do a marathon of The Godfather trilogy on Boxing Day. I’ve been doing it since the DVD boxed set came out, so at least ten years, maybe more. I converted over to blu-ray like a good boy when that became an option. I suspect I’ve missed it for the last few years running, but once you’ve done something half a dozen times, honestly, it all starts to blur together.
In all this time, though, I’ve never really done any writing about The Godfather trilogy. As with most “canon” / “Blind Spot” films, I don’t see much of a point – I can’t tell you anything about these movies that you don’t already know, in terms of their material content; I can only reflect on the pieces that jump out on me each time, or every time – which is what you’ll get below.
Last week I was talking with my friends about how completely our relationship with movie marathons has changed in the era of TV season binge-watching. There was a time when the inevitable Hobbit/Lord of the Rings marathon would seem like an impossible task (20 hours-ish, all told), but it seems nowhere near as far out of reach now. A 9-hour Godfathertrilogy walk-through, meanwhile, barely even seems like sitting down any more. I watched two full seasons of Vikings in 36 hours once, and tore off the entire fourth season of LOST in a single day. Three discrete 3-hour packets of movie barely requires the time it takes to get comfortable.
The wedding scene that opens The Godfather is 27 minutes long but it flies by, so expertly is it composed of tiny parcels and vignettes. It condenses play-by-play information into such digestible chunks that it’ll be years before you realize how completely it sets up the entire narrative, not just of this film but big parts of the other two, as well. The bucket category for at least half of American films should be “It all goes to shit.” There’s a lot of honesty in this idea: it’s what life is, a ceaseless negotiation downward of compromised prinicples and ideals. In retrospect, one will come to realize that the wedding scene at the start of Part I is the only time in the whole trilogy that you see the Corleone family whole and functioning. It is literally downhill from the very first scene. It’s like watching an avalanche, one that’s already in full power by the time Barzini contrives to use Carlo’s mistress to lure Sonny out of the house – and there’s a good 7 1/2 hours of story after that point.
“You found paradise in America,” Don Corleone intones to Bonasera about the latter’s request for vengeance over his daughter, and we see a bit of that paradise a few scenes later, in Coppola’s creamy dream of classic Hollywood, classic Los Angeles, c/o Woltz International Pictures and the frame-up for the horse-head scene. Woltz assures Tom Hagen that his America isn’t all dollars and cents… it’s sex, too, and that the actress ruined by Johnny Fontaine was “the greatest piece of ass I’ve ever had, and I’ve had ‘em all over the world.” There isn’t a single man in the whole Godfathertrilogy who doesn’t, at least in part, view women, love, and sex as a single mercantile commodity. I oughta go into exile in Sicily sometime, based on how quickly this film supplies Michael with a good Italian bride with no speaking voice and nice tits; all domestic partnerships, including our “hero’s,” are negotiated similarly. “It’s not personal – it’s simply business” applies more to marriage than it does to the film’s criminal activity. No sooner has Apollonia been blown up than Michael is back in America closing the deal with Kay. The first words out of his mouth: “I came here because I need you.” I wonder if Kay ever looked back on that moment and understood that Michael was telling the literal truth, and not the truth she’d heard.
This leap in the film’s third act always seemed to me too abrupt: an unannounced 1-year jump forward in time in which Michael has returned to America, become Don, and set into motion a plan to annihilate all of the Corleones’ enemies while simultaneously migrating the family business into legitimacy and moving the center of the family’s strength from New York to Nevada. It’s a huge, huge narrative switch – and it takes place between the space of a cut. And then we jump ahead even further – at least four, if not five more years – and again, it’s unannounced, unintegrated into the narrative by anything more than a mention of Michael’s son’s age in passing in conversation with Don Vito.
“There just wasn’t enough time, Michael, wasn’t enough time,” Vito laments to his son, the first grasp of a grim reality that will become the trilogy’s primary focus in increasing measure as it goes along. These are stories about death, and how life goes from ideal to compromise to dismay to despair. There will never be enough time, and panic sets in as Michael begins to learn what his father meant.
The flashback narrative of The Godfather, Part II undercuts the solvency of the family even as presented in the wedding scene of Part I. The story, truly began with vendetta – when Vito was only nine – and it ends there as well, when the adult (though not yet Brando’d) Corleone returns to Sicily to close the loop. Where the violence of the first film seems largely like a game of Stratego played along business lines (which just happens to involve complex assassination plots), the second film inverts the focus, making it clear that blood vengeance is the prime mover of all of Vito’s actions, the business just another tool in his inventory to protect his family from every potential enemy on the planet.
Part II is looser in its pacing than Part I, and dreamier in its overall approach, which deadens the tension in the first hour before generating a rather magnificent, nauseating effect as the Corleone world spins completely out of control, right around the conclusion of the Cuba incident. This works better in the context of a trilogy watch than it does as a stand-alone; Part II is basically the expanding shockwave that follows the explosion at the end of Part I, doing vastly more damage, and with much less control. The Godfather II feels like unmitigated chaos at its most evil, the die cast before the story even began, the “puppeteer” this time simply fate and consequence, rather than the humans vain enough to believe themselves holding the strings. After Cuba, the darkness is absolute – and unyielding till the final frame.
For all its later import, I love the moment Vito realizes he’d rather be running the Don Farucci’s operation, rather than take the nicely-paying job under Farucci he’s just been offered. His response is immediate and absolute, and sets up every death that follows. The assassination sequences in the Godfather trilogy are the visual rigour around which the rest of the frame is built. Coppola goes to the Russian editors for inspiration almost every time, composing single, distinct tableus with one odd, attention-drawing detail: Mo Green’s shattered glasses, blood pouring from the eyeball behind; a throat wound choking McCluskey before Michael puts one through his skull. The kill for which the franchise is probably most famous is Vito killing the Don, his muffling towel aflame; but my favourite is Carlo getting whacked in the front seat of the car at the end of Godfather I, kicking the windshield out in his death throes to remove the exploitative splendour from the image.
“You can never lose your family,” Mama Corleone tries to assure Michael at the end of Godfather II, sounding more like a curse than a benefit. Michael, meanwhile, later says ”If history has taught us anything, it’s that you can kill anyone.” That’s all any of it came to, at the end of the day – the only transaction the Corleones ever learned. One of the reasons Part II is better-regarded than Part III is that it’s just as definitive on the inevitability of death but with none of the operatic sentimentality. The sentimentality in Part III works better in the context of a conclusion to the 9-hour cycle than it does to the individual 3-hour film; the business at the opera is splendid in its own right (and is very, very indicative of the filmmaker Coppola had become), but sits uneasily at the crown of all the naturalism that’s come before.
This is The Godfather trilogy, so we have to learn to cook something – for The Godfather, Part III I made gnocchi with a gorgonzola cream sauce. The gnocchi, I’ll trust you know how to do yourself. The sauce took a cup and a half of heavy cream, with 200g of soft gorgonzola melted in it, and a couple teaspoons of flour; it made enough to feed three or four, but that is the undying curse of my singledom.
It’s always amused me that The Godfather, Part III, is commonly viewed as a calamitous failure on The Phantom Menace level, when the truth is, it’s a good movie that isn’t as good as its antecedents, and suffers more by disappointment than anything else. May all our disappointments be this rich. Baroque where Part II was languid, and sensationalistic where Part Iwas more grungily exploitative, the biggest knock against Part III is merely its operatic nature – though arguably, the goings-on here are so unapologetically Shakespearean in their scope that singing them to the rafters (both literally and figuatively) can easily be forgiven.
And I’m sorry, the gnocchi scene is fucking sexy, and it doesn’t matter how crap Sophia Coppola’s performance is overall. Yeah, she’s really all over the place in this movie – some scenes I think she’s perfectly fine, and some I can’t stand her. She’s in the weirdest position in all of the movies, though: not just being directed in a pivotal role (her first) by her own father, but in a role that is the manifestation of both the Corleones’ virtue and their vice in a single person. All of Mary’s innocent grace is balanced against the ink-black rivulet of incestuous lust/love between her and her cousin Vincent, and she becomes the walking totem of the disease at the heart of the family – even if she, quite realistically I think, thinks she’s just another teenager being persecuted for loving a boy against her family’s wishes. She’s not, and the Mary/Vincent “romance” is the perviest extrusion of the cancerous place of sexuality in the Corleone legacy, made all the more so by the fact that Mary and Vincent might be the only two lovers in the whole trilogy who actually, y’know, love each other.
But if the series has been perennially fascinated by death and decay, then Part III holds a crucial position in that narrative almost by default. It sees Michael off into the great beyond, sure, but moreoever, it reconfigures the Corleone family into its final, destructive movement. Connie, now nearly a black widow spider, has become the clan matriarch; Michael is wriggling his way into the Vatican’s favour while self-destructing under the decades-long weight of guilt. (His confession scene, played against a cardinal who looks disturbingly like my late grandfather, remains a series highlight.) ”Your sins are terrible, and it is just that you suffer,” Michael is told, and Part III is a disturbing tale of the degree to which the key decision points in all our lives are, irretrievably, in the past. We watch death catch up to Michael throughout, the humiliation of mortality tearing him apart for three hours before he finally keels over into the dirt in the trilogy’s final frame. And in my particular paradigm, there’s one more level of hell for Michael Corleone: he’s doomed to do it all over again, every year, on the 26th of December.