["Face/Off" is a recurring feature in which two Screengrab regulars who on their friendliest day couldn't agree on whether or not the sun is hot trade reactions to a movie. This week, in tribute to the release of "The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration" on DVD and Blu-Ray, Sarah Clyne Sundberg and Phil Nugent attempt to set each other straight on "The Godfather Part III."]
SARAH CLYNE SUNDBERG:OK Phil, here she goes:
I think The Godfather: Part III is a great movie. There, I said it. It has always been a bit of a mystery to me why it is so maligned by just about anyone who thinks they know anything about movies.
I also love the two previous Godfathers, but what would the cycle be without Part III? Part II suffers from the common mid-trilogy malaise of the confused and incomplete story arc. Part III, like the first Godfather movie, is a stand-alone.
The Godfather: Part III is a movie by a middle-aged man about people past their prime looking, back on their regrets. We see the extent of Michael Corleone's fall from young idealistic college boy. We get inside his head and see his disgust at his own corruption and at that of humanity in general. The Vatican is utterly unholy, as are the highest reaches of the "legitimate" business world to which he once aspired. His American dream has turned to shit. The dream house on lake Tahoe is in ruins.
Michael's curse is surviving. He will die among the tomatoes and the olives in Sicily. Utterly alone. Unlike his father, there are no grandchildren to make orange-peel false teeth for.
It isn't subtle but who watches The Godfather for subtlety? Who can't relate to Michael's pain at the way things turned out? Who doesn't feel a tug at the heartstrings when Michael and Kay talk about how it all went wrong?
One common complaint is Sofia Coppola's acting. Yeah, her delivery could be better. But she is playing a rich and vapid teenage girl. She isn't supposed to come off as heartfelt and deep. How about that scene where Andy Garcia's character asks, "Who's your father?" and she bats her big heavy eyelids and goes, "I'll give you a hint, he's Italian." Can't mess with that. Moreover, she's so amazingly beautiful to look at that everything else is beside the point. The movie as a whole is easy on the eyes. Take that scene on the steps of the opera house in Palermo: Loved ones shot down, the Anglo ex-wife howling like a Sicilian widow. What other way could one possibly wrap up a story like this?
PHIL NUGENT: Sarah,
There are a lot of niggling little problems with The Godfather Part III that I could niggle over, but the movie was released almost twenty years ago, to a movie press that did have its knives out, and most of those nits have been well picked already. So I'll jump right ahead to what looks to be our core disagreement: the idea that the story that Coppola had already lavished so much time on needed completing. I think that The Godfather Part II is about as great as movies get, and I don't think it left anything unresolved that needed resolving. You can leave the theater or switch off the DVD wondering what Michael Corleone did with himself to kill whatever time he had left to him, but he's a hollow shell and a lost soul, beyond redemption. Wherever you pinpoint the moment at which his soul turned to ash--whether it was when he shot up that restaurant or saw his first wife blown up or cast his second wife out of his life or ordered a hit on his own harmless dope of a surviving brother--he's sunk deep into the life that he was determined to forswear at the start of the first film, and he ain't coming back. It's the logical conclusion to his story and the point at which his life can yield no further meaning.
For some of us, the truly awful thing about The Godfather, Part III is that it betrays what Coppola and Pacino achieved in the first two movies. They didn't get around to making it until they'd both had the chance to discover that the career apotheosis they'd enjoyed between 1972 and 1974 is not the natural order of things, and they allowed their nostalgia for their own better days to get to them and took it as a license to go soft on the character of Michael Corleone. Now he's a loving old booger with a Gertrude Stein haircut who keeps Kay (Diane Keaton), the outsider he ran out of his house on a rail, standing around in the hallway oozing tolerant acceptance. It's not clear what exactly he's been up to in the twenty years left unaccounted for since the end of the second picture and the beginning of this one, though he does have the overscaled self-righteous self-pity of a man who gave filmmaking a try and doesn't understand why his visually ambitious adaptations of S. E. Hinton movels weren't better received. But even if he was busy building hospitals for Mother Teresa in the off-season, the movie shows an unseemly eagerness to let him off the hook. With no transitional explanation, he's gone from being a monster to a man whose worst failing is that, with all the millions of dollars at his disposal and all those button men to order around, he was unable to defeat his powerful enemies from murdering the Pope.
There are some good things in this movie that don't get talked about enough. Talia Shire's Connie's transformation into the widowed Lady Macbeth of the Upper East Side is the one piece of characterization that represents a strong, believable, and compelling line from the first movie to the last, and the cold fire in her eyes could make the Cloverfield monster remember that he has urgent business in another hemisphere. And though Sofia Coppola's performance isn't nearly as strong, it's nice to see someone sticking up for. When GF III opened, Sofia Coppola took the brunt of the harsh criticism like a beachhead taking a tsunami. Sofia was pushed into appearing in the movie after Winona Ryder dropped out, and having a bunch of assholes in the press and on TV sneer at you and accuse you of not having done as good a job as Winona freaking Ryder would have done is a hell of a punishment for having tried to humor Daddy. I don't think she's very good in the movie--would it have killed Daddy to have at least sprung for a vocal coach?-- but she's a great camera subject and has a touching presence, and she's very winnable in those little moments like the one where, all yearning uncertainty, she tells Andy Garcia, "I love you, cuz." She did not have a great acting career ahead of her, but I take some satisfaction in the fact that, eighteen years later, her place in contemporary film history seems a lot more secure than Winona Ryder's.
SARAH CLYNE SUNDBERG: First of all, stopping at The Godfather: Part II would be ludicrous. Everybody knows that the important things in life come in threes: The golden era Supremes, the patriarchs, the Three Stooges.
It looks like our fundamental disagreement is over whether or not there is a worthwhile story left to tell at the end of Part II.
The way I see it is as follows: Beside the blood and the gore and the cannoli, the Godfather is a fairly universal story about life.
Most of the times our lives don't turn out the way we wanted. Like Michael Corleone everyone with half a heart is an idealist when they are young. Like Michael Corleone everybody with half a brain learns that they are no less corrupt and compromised than other people and certainly not than their parents. Life then, like The Godfather is about learning to face yourself and the world despite the inherent disappointment and imperfection. This is why Part III is vital.
You are right. It isn't clear exactly what Michael Corleone has been up to since we last saw him. But it is fair to assume he hasn't been building hospitals for Mother Teresa. His medal of honor from the Vatican is meant to indicate the corruption of the Catholic Church, rather than the goodness of Michael Corleone's business activities.
Perhaps he is in some sense a monster. An aged monster. But also just a petty little man. He goes to confession for the first time in years. He knows and we know and the priest knows there is no absolution for what he has done. Still, he's got to go on living, he's got to get a long with his family.
Analogy: The holocaust happened, we still have to live in the world. I can sit in Berlin in 2008 and enjoy a beer and a beautiful sunset. These to concepts don't exclude each other. Dealing with the contradictions is what being human is all about. The Godfather: Part III is a movie about two middle-aged men, by two middle aged men, about how to keep living in the face of overwhelming evidence that most things turn to shit.
This is what makes The Godfather: Part III a story worth telling. A life that ends at thirty or forty is but half a life, after all.
PHIL NUGENT: Half a life? I'm aiming to live to a hundred sixty myself. For one thing, I'm looking forward to seeing a new home video release of The Godfather movies, with each successive release being hailed as the first one that does the movies justice and makes all its predecessors look like dogshit, every seven or eight years. I figure that by 2140, they'll have it tweaked to the point that I can reach out and give Apollonia a shoulder massage. But my own longevity aside, I tend to think that most stories reach a logical stopping point long before everybody, or even just the main character, dies. I think The Godfather Part III itself does that: I wish to God they'd faded to black on the scene with Pacino and Sofia on the steps and not shoved in that unnecessary last shot of Pacino toppling off the bench. (Couldn't they at least have hired Ruth Buzzi to come in to sit next to him and occasion the toppling by hitting him with her handbag?)
I'll say this, though: it's definitely a tribute to the power of these movies that it's understandable that people could come out of the sixth hour in the company of these characters and feel that they hadn't gotten enough. (And with the flashbacks in Part II, Coppola managed to make the telling of the lead-in to the story as compelling as spinning it out further. Though he couldn't have known it at the time, this meant that he got to trump George Lucas, who did okay with the Star Wars sequels, but with the prequels, not so much.) It's not as if he's spent the last twenty-five years fighting off demands from the studios that he let them pay him to make Rumble Fish II. And I have to respect Coppola's insistence on treating the third one as if it were part of the family, keeping it included in the box sets. (He could easily weasel his way out of doing that by saying that the point of the re-issues is the restoration of the originals, and that Part III, which was made more recently with pretty current technology, is already available in an acceptable format and doesn't require the same herculean restoration labors as the older films, which were made with a since discontinued color process.) Coppola has done everything short of piss mercury to expand on his cinematic legacy since 1974, and while many of the movies he's made since then have their supporters, none of them have gone very far in denting the impression that he was basically put on Earth to make movies about the Corleones. I guess he ought to have some say in deciding how many of these movies there are.