Francis Coppola's The Godfather

The Godfather, Parts I and II

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola

Paramount, 1972 and 1974

Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, based on Mario Puzo’s novel, is a masterpiece, and its deep engagement is one of both style and content: its story is not only about the induction of one young man into a crime family—there is something more elemental beneath that, something about innocence and experience, idealism and pragmatism.  The Godfather is one story featuring an Italian crime family, told in two parts (two films that can be screened or seen as one), with three main narrative sections; and it is about the inevitable discovery of the deep cruelty and violence of the world, and accepting and mastering those realities.  A young Italian man chooses what is over what could be: he betrays his best self and his love and even members of his family to survive in a cruel, violent world.  He becomes the cruelty, the violence.  Everything is done in the name of family, but it is hard to see or know what private family life is worth—that seems small and mundane in relation to family as a business enterprise, in relation to money and power, with much remaining unspoken (well, not exactly unspoken: spoken and ignored).

In light of the fact that little could be said to be at stake—the son of a major criminal becomes a criminal, and he and other criminals try to kill each other, one would think that the story would have less grasp of the imagination of the viewer, but its grasp is secure thanks to the attitude, atmosphere, and tone of The Godfather.  The film’s language, its style of telling its story, are compelling, satisfying; and the film makes the viewer comfortable in a volatile world.  The locations, whether in New York or Italy, high life or low, seem historically accurate, and vivid, and the acting is confident, earthy, and the often slow pace natural.  A sense of reality is created, and of drama within that reality.  As well, seeing some people outwitting other people remains exciting: often what makes a film intriguing is the strategic use of intelligence, though that is not necessarily what we are thinking about as we watch.  One writer that I admire, Pauline Kael, liked the film; and another, James Baldwin, disdained it, seeing in its violence a betrayal of human nobility.

Part I is focused on an old, powerful criminal, a don, and his granting of favors before his daughter’s wedding, the wedding activities, and the don’s subsequent rejection of a business proposition, a rejection that produces a violent reaction that leads to his war-hero son, for whom there had been high hopes, becoming involved in the criminal world.  Part II is about the childhood and early life of the old criminal, and also about what happens after the old criminal’s promising son becomes part of the criminal world.  Marlon Brando is, of course, impressive as the old don, Vito, Don Corleone, a father of three sons (Santino, Fredo, and Michael), a man who has achieved his own kind of wisdom, though his bit of buffoonery before his final demise is trademark (was Brando’s insistence on humor a way of giving a character more life, or a way of mocking everything—or both?).  James Caan as Santino, called Sonny, is good too, intense, tough, humorous, though his body being torn apart by bullets—the jerky gestures—have become inspiration for both actors and satirists.  It was Al Pacino as Vito’s son, the young then aging, more lethal Michael, and Robert DeNiro as young Vito, the struggling immigrant who becomes the young don, who were most impressive—uniquely attractive men and greatly resourceful actors.  Their intensity and ability to suggest movement from morality to immorality, with its physical and spiritual effects, are remarkable: depth and strength accrue to their intelligence and masculinity, while lights go out in whatever areas in their personality house sensitivity or spontaneity.  However DeNiro as Vito is able to suggest some amusement and sympathy that Pacino’s Michael seems too cold and too shrewd, really too small, for: the new don, Vito’s son Michael, is a more inventive criminal than his father and a smaller man.  The Godfather is a great story, about an Italian family and the creation of American monsters.

The women—Michael’s sister Connie (Talia Shire) and Michael’s wife Kay (Diane Keaton)—who are aware and have some emotional or spiritual life are the ones who suffer: they cannot quite make themselves small or simple enough to fit into the boxes made by others for them.  Individual wants or needs are ignored if they do not fit into family business plans.  The girlish Connie is introduced to a young man by her brother Sonny, and after her marriage she is a mousey wife with a rebellious temper, and following her husband’s death, enacted by the family in vengeance, she is glittering, driven, wild, and then when her mother dies she accepts regret and responsibility.  Diane Keaton as Kay is very pretty, prettier and possibly more traditionally sensuous than usual, and her voice is mostly controlled, not fluttering or flighty, but that voice does not have as much energy as I imagine it should (I wonder if Keaton and Woody Allen, for whom Keaton portrayed an eccentric Annie Hall, had a rapport built on recognized depression).  Kay cannot accept a compromised life, and the constant threat of violence.  When she faces Michael late in the story, Kay’s face is full of awareness and apprehension, and the viewer intuits affection, before Michael closes the door against her.  Family business could be an allegory for business everywhere, only more bloody.  The Godfather was violent for its time, but its violence does not feel as painful or seem as gruesome as some of the excruciating violence we see now in film.  It did raise the level and believability of film violence, and remains echoed in current films (it seems as if the tolerance for violence, as well as vulgarity, is always being broadened). 

The Godfather dramatizes the fact of act and consequence: one family does something, and another family reacts.  It is survival won and lost with amoral intelligence and assaultive force on a brutal level.  One watches the two parts of The Godfather entertained by its story, and feeling as if something more significant is being touched.

Art & Trash

How much reality can art hold?  The late sixteenth-century Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio drew from life and painted that, even included known figures in mythological scenes, with some of his work getting disapproval for its realism.  Gustave Courbet painted peasants at a country funeral, A Burial at Ornans (1849), a scene of surprising and simple dignity.  Marcel Duchamp, in the early twentieth century, signed a readymade urinal R. Mutt, and called it art.  Robert Rauschenberg put pieces together, some of which might have been considered garbage, in what were called “combine” pictures or sculptures.  In the quest for beauty, is what used to be left out of art, the mundane and the trashy, what is real, what is true?  Or is the essence, the ideal, the accomplishment of virtue against ordinary and great odds, the true?  Is the presence of what had been absent in previous times the content that makes modern art real, and true?  Is the garbage now perceptible in art—whether painting and sculpture, film, music, or literature—what makes art more recognizable and relevant, or much less meaningful?  

Serious art, often made for a selected few rather than a large mass, has often struggled with how much fact, or truth, to let in.  It can be interesting to note what happens when revelations reach a popular level.  Watching The Change-Up (2011), a movie with Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds, directed by David Dobkin, I was compelled to think again about comic vulgarity in popular film.  In the movie, two friends, one a businessman married with children, and the other a drug-using most unemployed actor, envy the stability or freedom in the other’s lives, and after a quirk of magic, each man’s personality or spirit wake up in each other’s bodies.  Bateman has mastered the ordinary part of a capable and professional, middle-class man who is not particularly self-assertive, and Reynolds, often an attractive go-getter, is proving himself able to take on an increasing range of roles, as here, as a dopey, flaky man.  The film, which contains some realism about adult responsibility and immature laziness, contains a lot of humor regarding the body, not only in terms of sexual references but with what used to be called toilet humor (there are several toilet scenes in this movie).  Of course, I thought of other films with a similar sensibility, in which what used to be unsayable now seems a great reason for, or strategy in, doing a film: Seth Gordon’s Horrible Bosses (2011), in which Jennifer Aniston plays a dentist that harasses her assistant with graphic sexual language; and the Farrelly Brothers’ Hall Pass (2011), in which wives give their husbands permission for short-term cheating (during the course of the film we are presented with contrasting full-frontal male nudity—showing male genitals used to be taboo).  All three films allow a certain slippage, a certain ambiguity, in how the men relate to each other’s bodies (in Horrible Bosses, there is a brief talk about whom would be the most rape-worthy in prison; and in The Change-Up, after the men change bodies, each notices intimate things about the other’s body, and one says he is tempted to kiss his own male member, and later the other masturbates while inhabiting his friend’s body).  It is the kind of consciousness that would not exist without feminism and the gay liberation movement, but, while absorbing the rewards and mining the humor, pays no significant regard to political consciousness.  The thing is, these movies offer scenarios that many people can relate to: they are situation comedies of work and love focused on attractive people entering middle age and confronting the choices they have made; and they cannot be said to be merely superficial or exploitative—but the vulgar humor in them is a great part of their power and appeal.

While allowing for the use of waste in art and entertainment, what are we giving up?  While applauding or laughing at all this shit, what are we doing without?