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The Godfather
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There is much in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather that marks it as the
beginning of a new era in American cinema: its fix on violence, physical and
psychological, as the core of contemporary life; its expansive, dispassionate,
almost sociological account of the workings of a criminal institution; the boldly
deep tones and colours pioneered by cinematographer Gordon Willis.
The Godfather changed the face and the course of modern American
cinema. The number of filmmakers who still genuflect to it, testifying to its prime
influence on their work, is astounding. In a fascinating essay contained in the
1989 anthology The Cinematic Text:
Methods and Approaches, William Simon argues that it belongs to a group of
films that grasp and explore violence as the physical and psychological core of
American life – in this respect, belonging with Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973)
and Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975).
Perhaps most striking today, however, is its
presciently pessimistic view of men and male power: guys attempting desperately
to control and shore up a cold empire that excludes, silences or marginalises
women at every key point, including the chilling final moment when a door is calmly shut on Kay (Diane Keaton). Coppola took this dark pessimism about men and their power
even further in The Godfather Part II in 1974.
On the other hand, there is an undeniable glamour,
gravity and pathos attending these criminal gods forever approaching their
inevitable twilight. How could there not be a weighty emotion attached, when
these guys are incarnated by such magnificent, commanding actors as Al Pacino,
James Caan, Robert Duvall and Marlon Brando?
On this level, there is indeed something magisterially
generic, classical and old-fashioned about The
Godfather: it is an apotheosis of the gangster film, whose anti-heroes, torn between fierce family loyalty and anarchic social
destruction, both attract and repel us – like ambiguous, distorted
mirror-images.
Nowadays, every re-release is automatically hyped as a
masterpiece or classic – often in a sorry confusion of box-office performance
with lasting aesthetic quality. It’s as if any old,
acclaimed or commercially successful movie has passed over into a Nirvana where
it is beyond evaluation or criticism of any sort. On a technical plane,
it is sure good to see The Godfather anew, with almost perfect colour and shading, and an
enhanced, digital sound mix.
But, all lame quips about equine heads and unrefusable offers aside, how
does it really rate as a work of cinema art? Within the range of films restored
to the public gaze in the late 1990s, it is vastly superior to the Star Wars series but not quite in the league of The Wild Bunch (1969), Touch of Evil (1958) or Days of Heaven (1978).
In truth, Coppola's film – and it remains one of his
best – is an odd mixture of thinness and richness, like all the most
spectacular, tottering highlights of his career, such as Apocalypse Now (1979), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) and One From the Heart (1982). (His
lower-key films, more of a piece, tend to be his most quickly forgotten and
underrated, such as Gardens of Stone [1987] or Peggy Sue Got Married [1986]). Magnificent individual scenes are set within an overarching narrative
structure that is somewhat monotonous and repetitive: here, an exquisitely slow
build-up, four times over, to a bloody, apocalyptic act of violence.
Coppola's grasp of Big Themes (as Claude Chabrol once dubbed
them) has always been elementary – as public statements like “Michael Corleone
is America” or “the Mafia is America” betray – and his dramatisation of such
grandiose conceits (he likes to add, in interviews,
that criminality is the model or metaphor for the social world at large)
is frequently bombastic.
The Godfather never quite manages
to become the sum of its parts. And yet the parts are so often astounding. One
of its most revolutionary aspects within the context of mainstream American
cinema was its painstaking attention to detail, and its fresco-like approach to
vast, elaborate situations such as the wedding ceremony that opens proceedings
– long sequences that have the grandeur and sharpness of Luchino Visconti's
best work in The Leopard (1963). Martin Scorsese, John
Woo, Spike Lee … all, in their diverse ways, took inspiration from Coppola's
invention of a new rhythm and density in scene construction.
And, however simplistic the film may be on its
grandiose level of intention, no one could deny that its specific dramatic
emotions and moods – particularly every clinch and slow-burn that involves menace, suspicion or the threat of intimate betrayal –
are brought powerfully alive by Coppola and his extraordinary cast.
To watch The
Godfather, or either of its two sequels, is to truly be taken on a long,
slow, painful journey – a descent from youthful exuberance and possibility to a
morbid state of decadence and moral numbness. It is not a happy or edifying
trek, but is certainly darkly satisfying and unforgettable.
MORE Coppola: Rumble Fish © Adrian Martin August 1997 |
