Review: The Godfather and its lineage
The first shot of The Godfather is quiet as can be. It’s of a man named Bonasera (Salvatore Corsitto), sad-eyed with sallow skin, standing against a wall of pitch-black shadow. In whispers, he tells the story of his daughter, who was beaten by a boyfriend and one other man when she fought off their attempt to rape her. The attack left her face disfigured, with a shattered jaw and broken nose. The young men were tried in court, but let off with no punishment; there’s the implication that Bonsera’s daughter didn’t receive justice because she is Italian-American.
As the man talks, dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief, the camera zooms out, until the side of another man’s face comes into view. This man’s back is turned, but his jowls and powerful shoulder frame the screen as though he were the camera.
Of course, this is Vito Corleone, played by Marlon Brando — “godfather,” mafioso, and Bonasera’s last line of support in his search for justice. “I’ll give you anything you want,” the lesser man pleads. But Corleone merely scratches his cheek, moans, and rubs the belly of a kitten that’s rolling in his lap.
Before anything else can happen in The Godfather, director Francis Ford Coppola places his audience in Vito’s corner: his eyes, his perception become our own. Perhaps the most sinister aspect of this sinister movie is that it implicates its audience as being one with the eponymous don. It prepares us to accept him. To be him.
Later this month, The Godfather will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. Released near the end of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam and just a few months before Watergate, the classic mafia-family drama arrived at a moment of profound dismay in American history. Its unprecedented blend of baroque artistry and grabby set pieces — a severed horse head uncovered at dawn, the murder of Luca Brasi, “Leave the gun, take the cannoli” — ignited audiences, and it eventually became the highest-grossing movie of all time. (Jaws upset it four years later.)
It’s been re-released for a brief run in select AMC multiplexes. I saw it with my father in a Dolby Digital auditorium; with billowy reclining chairs and state-of-the-art sound effects that rumble the rafters as well as your tush, it’s a room designed to provide the most rarefied of viewing experiences. Nevertheless, we were distracted during the film’s aforementioned opening scene by some explosions coming from a superhero movie in the adjoining auditorium. It struck me as apropos that the half-century-old movie I was seeing, famous for its menace as well as its body count, should be muffled by the bluster of a movie marketplace that refuses to acknowledge age or true human peril, or own up to the implicitly violent nature of cinema. The Godfather is a keen reminder that only in the movies can a “shot” be completely silent.
What I found most noticeable revisiting this film was its emphasis on behavior. So much of Vito Corleone’s world is defined by gesture: a handshake, a whisper, a barrel-chested grunt or sigh. Every decision, every weighed option is subject to physical elaboration; this is true of Vito, and it’s true of his sons — the eruptive Sonny (James Caan), the acquiescing Fredo (John Cazale), the reasoning calm of adopted half-brother Tom (Robert Duvall), and, of course, Michael (Al Pacino), whose passive rage escalates into controlled fury as he assumes leadership of his father’s business. The film’s pageantry of masculinity is as much a vestige of Method acting (in this sense, too, Brando not only plays the younger actors’ father but their professional antecedent) as it is an illustration of ego, narcissism and punishing male pride.
Violence runs in The Godfather’s blood; it is manifested not only when the Corleones pull guns or piano wires on unwitting victims, but when they soothe, cajole, reprimand, or level a slow double-take at one another. With its focus on family, the film suggests that lineage has less to do with one’s origins and more to do with the choices made in conjunction with those origins. It is a consummate immigrant epic, because it waxes on the material process by which “self” and “family” are articulated at once within the often cruel, unjust limitations of America.
I find it disappointing that Paramount hasn’t coordinated a more substantial re-release for this film. With obvious ties to popular present-day gangster or crime series (The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Peaky Blinders, Ozark, etc.), The Godfather strikes me as the easiest of sells. People want to see it: I went on a Tuesday night, and the theater was respectably attended. The right marketing campaign could frame it as a ground zero, “The father of all true crime dramas…” — but, clearly, the ongoing adventures of Peter Parker make for a deliriously dependable cash flow, and Francis Ford Coppola hasn’t exactly been flattering the studios in his most recent round of interviews.
The truth is, The Godfather now affects a strangely influential and yet isolated relation to new American films. On the one hand, it was part of the earliest wave of Hollywood films to embrace violence in the wake of censorship (Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch, Taxi Driver, etc.) and thus helped usher in our current cinema’s almost codependent relationship with killing. It is very hard to go to a major studio movie these days and not watch someone taking someone else’s life; much of the time, those who are killed are granted few if any personal characteristics — they are faceless enemies, hideous aliens or screaming masses — but the psycho-emotional toll of witnessing murder, especially mass murder, can only weaken the will (and, therefore, discernment) of an audience.
On the other hand, though, Coppola’s film feels like a bit of a relic because the deaths in it do feel personal. You squirm, your heart sinks when the car carrying Michael’s young Sicilian wife (Simonetta Stefanelli) erupts in flames… when Michael shoots Sollozzo (Al Lettieri) and McCluskey (Sterling Hayden)… even in the balletic, penultimate sequence where Michael has his henchmen waste every other major New York crime boss while overseeing the baptism of his godchild. But then again, what’s more startling than the emotions surrounding them is the number of deaths… this is a movie that delights in loss of life, that treats it as a spectacle to be glamorized, or a feat to be cheered.
I think that the immorality of its ethos should factor into our critical estimation of The Godfather. Francis Ford Coppola is not solely responsible for the spiritual leadening of American cinema — yet he did fire a few dozen rounds into it.
This won’t stop people from loving his work, though. More than any other revered, classic movie, I associate The Godfather with an almost fraternal subculture: fans adopt its “never-take-sides-against-the-family” credo as a blood pact, linking themselves to the Corleone clan with an ardor that can border on the delusional. It all comes down to the film’s theme of patrimonial deference; when Michael insists that “family” is all that matters, what he really means is his father. His confidence is enough to win over an audience eager for consistency, flattered by the lengths to which one man may go to sustain that consistency. Coppola understood the romantic implications of murder, and tapped into his audience’s unfulfilled craving for cruelty as a form of affection.
For all their pretenses to professionalism and respectability, the Corleones are profoundly unworthy and vile people. Coppola never quite lets you forget this: Michael’s actions, especially towards his wife, Kay (Diane Keaton), are crushing, and the shadows in Vito’s study run very, very deep. But whatever self-commentary lurks within The Godfather is also not nearly as compelling as the sumptuous rigidity, the muscular embrace with which it demands that you honor it.
