When we decided to focus on some best picture winners, we had to do a bit of work figuring out which we had. Scanning the results, the choice for next in the queue was obvious: The Godfather. Since we own a box set of the trilogy, that meant watching them all. (Ironic "darn" and shake of fist).
The Godfather waltzed to a Best Picture win in 1972, beating out Cabaret, Deliverance, The Emigrants, and Sounder. Of those, only Deliverance has any kind of lasting cultural cache and then mostly as a banjo-sound-effect joke. Marlon Brando also took home a li'l golden guy for his iconic performance as Vito Corleone...er, or he would have, had he not famously refused it to protest the treatment of Native Americans:
The imaginatively titled The Godfather, Part II prevailed in the face of stiffer competition in 1974: classics such as Chinatown, The Conversation, and Lenny (featuring an incredible Dustin Hoffman performance) were in that field, with The Towering Inferno also nominated. In what I think is the only occassion of two actors winning Oscars for the same role, Robert DeNiro also won Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Vito as a young man. DeNiro, 31, and just breaking out after terrific performances im Bang the Drum Slowly and Mean Streets, kept his Oscar.
Despite its reputation as the redheaded stepchild of the trilogy, The Godfather, Part III, was also nominated for Best Picture. It lost to Dances With Wolves in 1990, which famously upset the far superior and inarguably better GoodFellas. Awakenings (good year for DeNiro!) and Ghost were also nominated that year. Nominated for 7 Oscars, Godfather 3 took home none (ANDY GARCIA WUZ ROBBED!). It did get some accolades: Sofia Coppola won two Razzies for Worst Supporting Actress and Worst Newcomer.
But this isn't all about awards...let's get to the movies. Typically, we take these movies one at a time but let's consider this two-part opera, and its underrated denouement, together as a whole below the jump.
THE GODFATHER TRILOGY (#61-63)
"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you." - Nietszche
Although it has a sprawling and star-studded cast, luxurious costume and set design, and a penchant for huge montages centered around the sacraments, all suggestive of an "epic," The Godfather Trilogy, we'd argue, is really a one man morality play. What happens to Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), a basically decent, intelligent, and hard-working man, when duty and honor demand that he avenge his father and protect his family? What happens, as Kay (Diane Keaton) puts it, when "all that Sicilian stuff" becomes a guiding and organizing principle?
And that's what compels us about The Godfather series. Most of us are not born into the largesse of big time organized crime, but we all have families and we all have dreams. We all understand the desire to break away from our origins and define our own fate but the primitive urge to defend from whom and whence we came.
We first meet Michael Corleone fresh-faced in an Army uniform at the wedding of his sister Connie (Talia Shire), and he and his paramour, Kay, appear to be the most "normal" (read: WASPish) of the attendees. Inside, his father, Vito (Marlon Brando), presides like a creature from another planet of ineffable class and threat. Writ small, The Godfather tells us how Michael becomes Vito or how Vito unbecame Michael - especially in the masterfully ambitious Godfather II, which traces Vito's ascent to head of his own family alongside Michael's fall down into the rabbit hole of preserving that "family" while losing his own.
By the end of Godfather II, where we get a flashback to Michael announcing his army enlistment to his brothers, the hothead son Santino "Sonny" Corleone (James Caan), the Charlie Brown-ish womanizer Fredo (John Cazale*), and the level-headed adopted consigliere Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), it becomes apparent that the tragic flaw of both Michael and Vito is that they believe duty and honor are the highest of values. Both lost everything they wanted by doing what they thought would give everyone else what they needed.
Slavish devotion to a cause, however, can bring its rewards. Especially when that cause involves maintaining a vast criminal conspiracy and compiling Vegas casinos. When we reach the denouement of the series, Godfather III, Michael is filthy rich enough to cut the Vatican checks for hundreds of millions of dollars, which puts him on the precipice of achieving his purported life-long goal of taking the Corleone family fully legitimate. Having turned over the criminal enterprise to the Shakespeare-quoting Joey Zasa (Joe Mantagna), Michael puts his sights on owning a giant European conglomerate, through which the Holy See holds its real estate. But the illegitimate issue of Sonny's philandering loins, Vincent Manzini (Andy Garcia) has eyes on stepping into Uncle Mike's gangster shoes...and his heart on his cousin Mary (Sofia Coppola) (yes, yuck). Through byzantine plot machinations these disparate parts conspire to, as Pacino famously puts it, "pull me back in" just when he thinks he's out.
But the point of Part III is that he was never really "out" and no one needs to pull him anywhere - he was already gone. The moment he decided, like all those before him, that blood must be paid with blood by killing Sollozo and the crooked police chief in The Godfather, he was in. All the money, all the dispensations from Rome, the sincere attempts to reunite with wife and children, don't matter. Blood wants blood.
This can be seen early in Part III (before he gets "pulled back in"), in perhaps the single most entertaining scene of the whole trilogy, where the very thought of someone besmirching the family name is still apparently worthy of a chewed-off ear to the supposedly reformed Michael:
Part III has its detractors. It suffers from a lack of Robert Duvall, who refused to participate unless paid a salary commensurate with Pacino's (who was offered three times as much to come back). The script is seeemingly rushed: at once too complicated (it's basically incomprehensible if you haven't seen the first two films recently) and too simple (Vincent somehow rises from bastard hanger-on to Don in seemingly weeks). Most tragic, however, is the decision of Francis Ford Coppola to replace Wynona Ryder (who dropped out for Edward Scissorhands) with his daughter, Sofia, who turned out to be a good filmmaker in her own right (The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation), but who was simply not an actress. She's just so out of her depth it takes you out of the picture, keeping a very good film from becoming a classic like its predecessors.
It does not reach the lofty heights of the '70's films, but Part III is a worthy epilogue to an American tragedy. Michael Corleone, who once assured Kay that he "was not his father," was exactly that all along and dies that way. Michael ends as he must, alone in the hard-scrabble ruins of a town emptied by honor.
Most importantly, however, Ms. ReViewing Habit finds Andy Garcia "beautiful" here.
FINAL VERDICT: KEEPER
NEXT UP: Because Andy Garcia is so damn beautiful, THE UNTOUCHABLES
*Cazale tragically died from a brain tumor after an all-too-brief career including performances in the first two Godfather films, Dog Day Afternoon, and The Conversation. Had he survived, I'm sure he'd be considered along with DeNiro and Pacino as among the greatest actors of his generation.
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