The Godfather

Francis Ford Coppola, USA, 1972
3.5 out of 4 stars

The key question here is, was the enjoyment I got from actually, finally watching The Godfather greater than the entertainment value I got from all the times people asked me, dumbfoundedly, “you’ve never watched The Godfather?!” As much as I would like to be a perverse contrarian (I admit it), yes, it was worth the trade-off.

There is, however, something of a profound miscalculation involved in watching a film like this when one is already 27 years old, which is to say that almost nothing in film could seem as familiar as this. I’m usually not that good at anticipating things, but this time I was able to see almost every murder or atrocity coming. Recognizing the origin not only of well-worn but sometimes-amusing catchphrases, not to mention the entire gangster genre as we know it today, with its tortured attitude towards glamorization of the practice, is fun in a way, but also invariably distancing.

The fact is, some seminal, watershed films were not as heavily imitated (because people didn’t “get it” at the time) and still have amazing power even now, while some were a bit too successful and as such can be robbed of their power by the legion of imitators that one may have had the misfortune to have seen first. Let me just say that the story is compelling, but moreso in the beginning, that the characters are interesting, but not especially complex, that the depiction of and attitude towards women could have been worse, but is still pretty pitiful (so what is the point of Michael’s first marriage, exactly?), and that (and this is perhaps the most regrettable) expectations for hyper-violence and confrontation have been inordinately escalated to the point where this film seems, dare I say it, quaint in some aspects. That we, the bloodthirsty mail viewers, don’t entirely get what we want (even if, at the time, we might not have known that we wanted it), constitutes one of the few suggestions that we should actually not admire and envy the mafia; of course, the glamour is there in enough quantity that that is not the overall message most young men got from the film (in particular, an entire generation of “gangsta rappers” who made names like Corleone even more familiar for me).

I am a bit curious about seeing the next one, as I could readily imagine how it might indeed be better. I will probably wait a while, though.

Source: Paramount DVD
8 Aug, 8:08 PM