Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #21 (Tied with L'Avventura and Contempt)
In 1979, director Francis Ford Coppola would unleash a realistic drama called Apocalypse Now that emphasized the realistic emotional and mental turmoil experienced by soldiers dropped into Vietnam. Coppola dove right into a war that had grown bigger than any human being could imagine and dared to imagine what it must be like to live, to breathe, to exist in the midst of all that carnage. Seven years prior, this same guy was responsible for a minuscule indie you may have heard of entitled The Godfather that applied the same thought process of pondering what it's really like to live a life of pervasive violence to the world of mobsters.
Mobsters have frequently been given the glamorous treatment by Hollywood but for The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola was looking to adapt Mario Puzo's book in a way that shined a light on the world of a mobster family that simultaneously lent more humanity and tragedy to the world of mobsters. It's an intriguing idea, one that offers plenty of opportunity for interesting character work that could be catnip for certain talented actors, that this motion picture utilizes incredibly well, making this one of those classic movies that doesn't just live up to the decades of hype it's accumulated but also surpasses it.
The Godfather opens at a wedding, specifically the wedding of the daughter of mobster Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando). It's a perfect place to start the movie off as it allows the audience to get to know each of the members of the Corleone family by way of extended mingling that occurs at the wedding. You also get to know the power Vito Corleone carries in the community by way of the extended conversations he carries with various clients during his wedding, as all kinds of people come up to him asking for favors that sound like they'd be impossible to procure. But for Vito Corleone, they're the kind of objectives that could be easily obtainable on one condition: the people asking for these favors must pledge their loyalty to him. That's all he wants. Loyalty.
It is here at this wedding that we get to meet the closest thing we have to a traditional main character in this sprawling tale, the man known as Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), the youngest son of Vito who also happens to be a decorated war hero. Michael is looking to go off into a more legitimate form of business than the mobster shenanigans that have informed his family for decades. His plans to lead a more conventional life are put into a tailspin when Vito Corleone is shot down in the street Now Michael has vengeance on his mind, vengeance that may just lead him to taking a greater role in his father's criminal enterprise than he originally expected....
When you get right down to it, The Godfather is a tragic coming-of-age story, one about a man coming thiiiiis close to breaking free of the criminal underworld his father lived and breathed only to become fully embroiled in it due to a lust for vengeance. Michael Corleone is such a well-formed character that you keep rooting for him to find a way out of the criminal world but subsequent tragedies (such as the assassination of his wife in Sicily, Italy) keep bringing him into this world of depravity. Because Michael Corleone is such a well-formed character, one is at the edge of their seat rooting for him to escape this world but you also empathize with the awful circumstances that keep dragging him into the mobster business while simultaneously being repulsed by the violence he commits.
Corleone is, of course, far from the only person that gets ample screentime in The Godfather. The large amount of time and effort devoted to fleshing out the various family members and associates that make up the Corleone family is a key component of why this mobster world feels so rich and engrossing. The sibling rivalry between Michael and Santino Corleone (James Caan) feels like a realistic depiction of how adult brothers act with each other while the more soft-spoken but experienced lawyer Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall) provides a nice contrast to the more outspoken Corleone family members he represents. All of these guys, and so many other members of the cast, truly come alive in the plot itself and make the intricate family drama that occurs following Vito Corleone's attempted assassination all the more captivating.
What's also interesting about The Godfather, aside from how rich and thoughtfully made the characters are, is how it depicts the various acts of violence that the mobsters commit. Instead of trying to depict the various killings, beatings and what not in a grandiose fashion, perhaps accompanied by some operatic music and depicted in slow-motion (tell me you don't see a number of modern-day directors depicting those kind of scenes exactly like that), Coppola instead removes any glamor from these brutal scenes, the obvious intended visual takeaway from such a move being that Coppola wants these moments of violence to shock, not awe, the viewer. Notice how the camera is frequently far away from the action when characters are committing violence while such deeds are typically framed against more mundane everyday settings (like an idyllic street corner where children are playing or a beautiful road in Sicily) that accentuate how out of place such grisly deeds are in the real world.
Instead of making the viewer think "How cool!" when mob violence goes down, director Francis Ford Coppola wants you to be horrified by the atrocities occurring and realize just how sick the world of mobsters really is. It's a powerful choice that works like gangbusters for The Godfather. Also hugely successful are the number of individual moments in this movie that have become so iconic over the past 45 years. You know the bits I'm talking about. "Take the cannoli!", the horse's head, "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse", all those bits and pieces. I've and/or heard all of that stuff quoted, parodied, lampooned and what not countless times over the years, yet watching The Godfather for the very first time (in a theatrical setting no less!) all of those external pop culture references melted away and those individual moments and quotes still worked tremendously well on their own. That;s what happens when you make a movie as excellent as The Godfather, it transcends all of the pop culture references and parodies to remind you that there's a fantastic reaosn such moments became iconic in the first place.
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