When I first saw The Godfather as a teenager I must have attached myself to the “thunderbolt” Al Pacino is hit by when he meets his future wife Apollonia, and she is struck too.
Now I look at this a little sideways. It doesn’t end well for them, after all. (She is killed in a car bombing). The violence in the film would have meant something different back then too. Movies generally were less violent, and bloody images still had a kind of prestige.
Crime cinema was a window into a hidden world — one of heightened operatic extremes, but also one that asserted an uncomfortable truth about real life. If you simply opened the right door on your own suburban street, the movies insisted, you’d find all the hidden pushing killing forces that really make the world. You’d see violence threatened or implied by men sitting down to talk — strictly business — and the wives would make dinner and pretend they didn’t see. This was the way of the world, the way of the powerful, even in the halls of supposed benevolence and justice.
The Godfather makes this point rather heavy-handedly in a late scene between Al Pacino and Diane Keaton, one that impressed me back then but now seems too easy —
MICHAEL: My father is no different than any other powerful man … any man who is responsible for other people. Like a senator or a president.
KAY: Do you know how naive you sound?
MICHAEL: Why?
KAY: Senators and presidents don’t have men killed.
MICHAEL: Who’s being naive, Kay?
In an America still reeling from the death of JFK, this must have been startling — as it was to teenage me — but now I just shrug at it. Violence is everywhere in movies now, and the violence of the powerful seems all too banal. More than that, our atmosphere now has a meaner irony, a more empty affect. We are less honest, less aware of each other, and less aware of the presence of the past. Our manners are disordered, our convictions are thin. There is less consciousness of virtue, and less confidence about what true virtue looks like. In general there is less virtue, everywhere.
I type this and feel it must be true, but then I’m reminded that The Godfather itself is already a nostalgia piece. It longs for a patriarchal authority that it knows is already almost gone. It prizes manners and virtues that most of its own characters don’t possess. It feels that the best times are behind us.
When Michael flees to Sicily to hide out after killing the men who tried to kill his father, he goes to his ancestral home of Corleone. He meets Apollonia and falls in love, and we see him try to reenact what must have been his father’s father’s life — an invitation respectfully solicited of the woman’s father, a phase of supervised courtship, and then a humble marriage celebration in the village, with a local marching band. This must be it, you might find yourself saying — the past recaptured.
Now I see more irony, which I missed the first time around. Corleone stands on a hill, beautiful from afar —
— but when Michael and his bodyguards walk through it, they find it dirty, desolate, and rundown. Where have all the men gone? asks Michael. One of his bodyguards answers: “Dead from vendettas”.
The bodyguard waves to passing American GIs in their jeeps — take me to America, where the people are rich …
Later, when the wedding procession walks down the village street, we see a landscape view. The hills are beautiful but the buildings are old, some of them even wrecked —
Michael’s fantasy is pure but the backdrop is a little shabby. It can’t last, and the world of the mafia catches up with him. Apollonia is killed and eventually he goes back to America to live out his future, which is our future.
And so the idea that we could return to Corleone is beautiful and is a lie — both things are true. How much it is true just of our time or of all times, it’s useless to say. We will keep finding ourselves looking back at it.
Watching The Godfather again recently was a kind of looking back, where I checked to see what was still pure and what now seemed rundown. Arguably the film could be called a fantasy of male chauvinism, where the women are passive and emotional, and keep to their sphere. Only Kay Adams questions the operatic order of these violent men, and even then only tentatively. The last shot of the film is of Michael’s henchmen shutting the door on her and her sense of concern. In a late scene, the Don says something like, “Women can afford to be careless, but not men.” There was a time when I might have been bothered by this, but now, like the violence, I shrug it off. The movie knows the worldview that Don Corleone represents is about to collapse. The chauvinism is just another color in its palette.
I used to love the snarky classic lines. I wanted to nestle into the virility of these gangsters and take some part of it for myself. Now it all seemed more anxious than before. Sonny Corleone, the horny brother played by James Caan, was once captivating, but now I found him a little boring. It felt obvious that he was doomed to die. It seems that hotheads are not Nature’s favorites.
I found Robert Duvall’s Tom Hagan more compelling this time. An orphaned boy of German Irish descent, the Corleone family finds him on the street and takes him in. As an adult he becomes the family lawyer. I used to take him for granted, the way the family does, but now he fascinated me in his colorlessness. In watching him we have a sense of a deeper inner life to which we are not given access, but also a curious stuntedness. He is more employee than son.
As a meditation on American ethnic experience, I found the film had affinities with some of my reading from earlier this year, like the novels The Netanyahus and Mona in the Promised Land. There is an implied anxiety in The Netanyahus that asks where Jews will turn if America fails them. Mona in the Promised Land is more outwardly cheerful, but its Chinese immigrant characters have the same fear — that America may yet betray their hopes for it. This is one reading of that line from the novel that caught my ear, when Mona’s teenage friend says: “Tell them this isn’t America. You among others are simply confused”.
The Godfather opens with a man saying “I believe in America”, but he’s come to the Don because America has failed him. His daughter was attacked and nearly raped, but a judge let the juvenile offenders walk, suspending their sentences. And so in search of real justice he goes to Don Corleone, whose Old World order is fading.
Like the Chinese parents in Mona, who strive for assimilation, Don Corleone imagines his son Michael rising to prominence in a career in law or politics. Something powerful but legitimate, a step beyond gangster. But Michael instead becomes the new Don, and like Edgar in King Lear is tasked with ridding the land of wolves. All are captive to the surging energies of money and power in America, land of metamorphosis. The future is Las Vegas, narcotics — not one they’re prepared to understand.
So The Godfather is a looking backward and a looking ahead. Now my favorite shot in this film of endless beautiful shots is a quiet one in the opening scenes. Michael has just arrived at his sister’s wedding. He’s wearing his army uniform. He’s a war hero, he’s just come home. Don Corleone spies his arrival through the window blinds, and we’re shown the quickest look at his eyes as seen from the outside —
So quick but so tender, this moment! The father, with an almost boyish avidity, eager to catch sight of the son he loves.
great film writing here- nice title, nice stills, and love the ending