i’m with you now
by Douglas Messerli
Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola
(screenplay, based on a fiction by Mario Puzo), Francis Ford Coppola (director)
The Godfather / 1972
Suddenly in facing writing about one
of my favorite films, The Godfather,
I become stumped. Not because it’s a “difficult” film to discuss; it’s
absolutely a straight-forward work, with an easily recountable plot, which is
central to the form of this narrative “gangster” film. But to simply focus on
the story would do a great injustice to this complex work.
The first third of the movie (at least it feels that way) is devoted to
a lavish wedding that is meant to be demonstrable evidence that Don Corelone
(Marlon Brando) is a wealthy being, willing to lavish everything on his beloved
daughter, Connie (Talia Shire) and his large community of “friends.”
Ironically, he himself must spend hours during the immense celebration in a
dark room, listening to the demands of some of these “friends” or want-to-be
friends about their sufferings as they seek his blessings and answers to their
problems. One, in particular, a small-time undertaker, Bonasera, complains of
the rape of his own daughter by young American boys; he wants revenge. The
Godfather’s entire position is laid out before us in his response; the
supplicant has first sought justice in American courts rather than attempting
adjudication—most often violent—through the more palatial court of the Don
himself. Money is not required, but absolute devotion and later demands for
services are. In short, once you sell yourself to the devilish Don, you are his
servant for the rest of your life.
The transactional world of The
Godfather, in short, is quickly presented to us in the very first scenes,
and the rest of the movie, heavy on plot machinations is simply a playing out
of those transactions.
Johnny Fontaine (Al Martino), a stand-in for Frank Sinatra tearfully
requests the Don help him obtain the part in a new film, controlled by the
studio head, Jack Woltz (John Marley)—the role I presume Sinatra eventually
played in From Here to Eternity—resulting
in one of the most horrific scenes in the film—after Woltz refuses and abuses
the Don’s consigliere, an adopted family member, Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall)—with
the decapitating and placement of Woltz’s prize horse in his bed.
Other such "transactions" include the heir-presumptive son Sonny’s (James
Caan) fucking of a young party-goer, his wife below joking about the size of,
presumably, the groom’s penis, and one of the don’s thick-headed underlings
begging for a meeting with the Godfather, simply to thank him for being invited.
When he (Al Pacino) arrives, with his girlfriend, Kay Adams (Diane
Keaton), he introduces her to the rambunctious family, remaining somewhat apart
from the rest of the celebrants, recounting to his girlfriend some of their
savory actions, while insisting he is not “them.”
Yet Michael is at the heart of this
entire family, father, mother, sister, brother, friends: he is their “spoiled
prince,” the emblem of what they are as a family. And unless you recognize this
at the very beginning of this powerful movie, you will never understand the
tragedies that lie within the narrative of the remainder of the first move and
the other films following. Michael, is the beloved family member who must
remain an outsider. And for the first several scenes in this film that is how
he perceives himself, the protestant school teacher, Kay, being the perfect
mate for him, precisely because of their obvious differences in social and
cultural experiences. Unlike later immigrant and religious families who
disapproved of marrying outside of the culture or religion, Michael has been
raised to do precisely that, to represent the full assimilation of the Italian
family within the larger culture.
Most of the rest of this nearly encyclopedic fiction, including all the
complex plot intricacies that take the film and its later manifestations
through the family’s rise in New York with returns to Sicily and Rome,
including the Vatican City, are almost tangential to the central story:
Michael’s Faustian pact with the devil.
In short, it hardly matters “what
happens” for the rest of the story. Of course, it does very much matter in
terms of the cinematic experience of Coppola’s beautifully filmed myth. It’s
Christmas 1945, Michael and Kay shopping in the lush stores of midtown New
York. They’ve just enjoyed a film at Rockefeller Center and have been shopping
at the stores thereabouts. How could they have known that in the days following
the wedding, Michael’s father, meeting with another outsider, “The Turk,” (Al
Lettieri), backed by the Corleones' rivals, the Tattaglias, another crime
family, had rejected his offer for the Corleones to become involved with drugs?
How could they have known of Sonny’s impetuous interruption of his father’s
careful rejection, which has made it clear that there are cracks in the family
ideologies? The details, in some respects, are insignificant to the larger
rhythms of the film. Suddenly Kay notices the newspaper headlines: Don Corelone
has been “hit,” is possibly dead.
One might say it is at the very moment
that plot is swept up into the psychological portraiture that Coppola has
established, as Michael, with no other alternative, returns to the family
circle, the purposeful family outsider returning to the den, a house presented
in Coppola’s designer’s set as a kind of cave of warmly-lighted rooms where the
men are in control, but the women hover over them. It is a world right out of
myth, particularly Sicilian life.
Their discussions remind one of a
war-time movie, plans of attack being intensely debated. Michael, the
ex-soldier, is an expert warrior. Although he is kept out of the early
discussions, the absence of his father allows him to reenter family
conversations from which he has previously been purposely excluded. Still,
basically he is ostracized, remains the outsider. Sonny and Tom are in charge.
A visit to the hospital, however, one of
the tensest scenes in Coppola’s work, changes everything. Strangely enough,
little happens in this desolate world which Michael suddenly uncovers. The
large, unlit structure is suddenly empty, all guards, nurses, doctors (one
cannot even imagine doctors within this space), all ancillary help has
disappeared. If there was ever a vision of a collapsed center, here it is. No
one is where all of us expect everyone to be, protecting, doctoring, bringing
people to health. There seem not to be even any patients—except one, Don
Corelone, all alone, a single nurse still there despite the abandonment. All
have been told to evacuate the place.
We follow Michael’s traumatic
recognition of the events. Clearly, enemies—one must be paranoid, obviously,
having grown up in the world that Michael has—have emptied the public space in
order to kill Corelone. With the help of the dawdling worker Michael transfers
his suffering father to another room, ordering a surprised and subservient
visitor to the Don to stand by the entrance, pretending to have a gun.
The entire scene, with its echoing
emptiness is one of the most dramatic scenes in the film, perhaps in all of
cinema. Yet its quietude represents one of the most frightening moments in
cinematic history. As Michael moves his father to another room in order to
protect him from inevitable “hit,” the Don confusedly awakens, Michael assuring
him, “I’m with you now,” a simple pledge of protection which, in the context of
the entire film, is also a commitment to evil. A tear falls from his father’s
eye in recognition of what has just occurred. All the family hopes for
Michael’s separateness have suddenly vanished.
Michael does not comprehend what that statement implies, nor, I might
suggest, did I upon first viewing: Michael, the purposeful representation of
family “salvation,” has, perhaps unintentionally, but most certainly, become
one of them and all the evil acts the
family has committed.
It is no wonder, that a few scenes later, after the not terribly bright
and rash Sonny has rushed to the New Jersey turnpike to his death, that
Michael, now truly a family member, determines to destroy “the Turk” and the
Tattagila-controlled cop by shooting them at a small Italian restaurant in the
Bronx.
An escape to the beautiful Sicilian
landscape and Michael’s sudden love and marriage with a stunning local beauty
only reiterates the pattern: love and death, revenge and revenge again. The
small town of Corelone has no males left. Michael—whose beautiful young wife is
blown up in a car explosion intended for him—can no longer comprehend his own
devolution, his commitment to his own and everyone else’s destruction. When he
returns to the US, his “new” life serves only as a repetition of the revenge
tragedy filled with lies, as he manipulates the death of all his enemies,
including Connie’s double-crossing—he has been indirectly involved with the
attempted killing of Don Corelone—and wife-beating husband whose marriage the
movie celebrated so enthusiastically in its early frames.
While avowing his commitment to serve as godfather to Connie’s newborn
son, Michael takes on the larger role of Godfather, killing most of those who
have betrayed the family, including the child’s father. Murders in Las Vegas
assure the family’s takeover of the city’s major casino. Michael is no longer
an individual but is a monster created by his family’s very attempts to protect
him from becoming one. The infection, as his wife Kay later reports, seems to
be somehow in the blood, embedded in the ritual Sicilian commitment to eternal
revenge, dooming generation after generation.
As the Don dies the natural death of a
heart attack, we realize that, despite the family’s great wealth, there can be
no enjoyment in that fact. One need only think back to the small New Jersey house of the Don’s early associate, Clemenza,
to realize that crime does not truly pay, that the wealth these figures might
have sought is really a search for power that ultimately has no effect. If they
have survived, it has given them little joy of life. An imprisonment of
mattresses and homemade spaghetti is surely not what they originally sought.
Los Angeles, October 12, 2012
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2012).
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