Alright, here I am at the final Stacker Countdown column with a couple weeks to go before the end of 2023. And somehow, it seems like the universe didn’t want me to watch The Godfather again. I had, months ago, found it on Paramount+ and put it on my watchlist. When I finally got back to it, it was no longer on the service. Well, I have the remastered blu-rays for the trilogy. Sure, I somehow never opened them, and I have no plans to ever watch the third part, but I had ’em. Getting that package open even proved a minor challenge, but then my blu-ray player didn’t seem to be working. I had to check to make sure it was plugged in, move around to make sure my remote control was pointing at it right, and so forth. I finally got the film playing and sat down for the final three hours of the Stacker Challenge.
And I am on record for not even being that big a fan of the film. Sheesh.
To be clear, I don’t hate The Godfather or anything. As a film, it’s about as operatic a tragedy as I think American cinema has ever produced. It’s almost Shakespearean in its own way. Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) may not be dead, but he might as well be in many ways. The idealistic young man from the start of the film who looked down his nose at the family business was gradually corrupted by it to the point where he’s leading it. His father Vito (Marlon Brando) says outright he never wanted that for Michael, but Michael is really the only choice within the family. Sonny (James Caan) doesn’t have the right temperament. Fredo (John Cazale) doesn’t have the intelligence. Connie (Talia Shire) is out of the business and a girl besides. Adopted son Tom (Robert Duvall) isn’t Sicilian. If the family business is to stay quite literally in the family, it has to go to Michael, someone who even by the end of the film is anticipating his father’s advice and already accomplished some of the things he will need to do even as he propels the family beyond the wildest dreams of his father.
There are, in a sense, two reasons why I don’t much care for The Godfather. One is a silly, petty one. I went to a Catholic high school, and pretty much every guy I knew there with even a smattering of Italian blood liked to A) remind everyone that they believed Italians were just better than everyone else, something that didn’t sit well with my Irish background, and B) idolize the life of the mob, from the looks of things, because of The Godfather. That is an incredibly stupid reason to hold anything against a piece of art that had nothing to do with the reactions of my friends and classmates. It is, in fact, so damn dumb that I am almost embarrassed to say anything. OK, I am not the least bit embarrassed, but I do know that’s a dumb reason.
The other is I often feel like The Godfather somewhat glamorizes life in the mob. To be clear, there are many violent actions throughout the film that aren’t done in a way to look even remotely glamorous. Garroting a man looks to be about as painful a way to go any other assassination throughout the film, and the film makes it clear that “it’s just business” can mean a lot of things, but it rarely means sitting down for a friendly chat to settle a contract dispute. It means someone (or a horse) is probably going to get hurt. Meanwhile, the bosses seem to be living the high life in luxuries the likes of which are beyond the means of most people, and there is something welcoming about the Sicilian culture on display when it isn’t part of the mob life.
Or is it? For all that the big dinners, fancy parties, and the like are part and parcel of life in the family, there is a feeling that you aren’t really welcome when you aren’t literally Sicilian. Tom Hagen is never really completely welcome within the family as he is the one most likely to be shoved aside when things get inconvenient. Kay (Diane Keaton) is kept even more in the dark than most. I don’t know, for example, how much Connie or Vito’s wife knows about how things go, but Kay doesn’t even know when Michael returned to the United States after his time in Sicily laying low until he goes to see her one year after the fact. I would think the family knew and just didn’t tell her. Granted, Michael may have still be in mourning for the death of his first wife Apollonia (Simonetta Stefanelli), and I can’t say if Kay even knew Apollonia existed.
As such, the film might just be less of a welcome to outsiders as a window to the lives of people who make their fortunes off violence, the threat of violence, and the miseries of others. Vito isn’t against the sale of narcotics because he believes that getting people hooked on potentially dangerous drugs is immoral or anything. He doesn’t want to ruin his political connections throughout the city. He collects favors and will cash them in when he needs to. He’s not a man prone to anger, only really raising his voice and yelling once in the entire film when singer Johnny Fontaine (Al Martino) cries over his inability to get a movie role. Sure, Vito will help Johnny get the part, and the acting thing isn’t what sets Vito off: it’s the tears. The Godfather produces a conundrum for me. I can readily see why some people might want in on that lifestyle. Parts of it look tempting. But there’s another part of me that can’t understand why anyone else would. I have always preferred Goodfellas as a mob film, and there are many reasons for that, most noteworthy being the characters in Goodfellas are never as classy as they think they are.
And then there’s the fact that The Godfather makes me actively uncomfortable in many ways. Part of it is the violence. The more realistic violence has never been something I have been entirely comfortable with in any film, and The Godfather isn’t afraid to show violence. But then there’s pretty much any scene involving Connie’s thuggish husband Carlo (Gianni Russo) after the wedding. He doesn’t seem to be able to do anything that doesn’t paint him as a brute, and while he certainly has what’s coming to him in the end, that doesn’t mean I really want to see him dishing out or being on the receiving end of violence. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Apollonia, a character who seems about as innocent as anyone involved in this world can be, and the hindsight of knowing what’s going to happen to her makes her scenes every bit as uncomfortable for me as Carlo’s.
So, really, I get it. I get why The Godfather sits at or near the top on so many “best of” lists. It just will never be one I would go back to all that often.
Though oddly enough, The Godfather (along with the Snydercut of Justice League) was used as a joke for the recent Barbie movie. Apparently, one of the things the Kens thought they had to do under their half-understood at best version of the patriarchy was explain The Godfather to any Barbie that mentioned it. That joke hit me in an unusual way. I saw Barbie by myself, but I did mention that bit to my girlfriend. She doesn’t get to the movies as often as I do, so it isn’t uncommon for me to explain plot details on some movies in conversation. It’s rarely more than a surface level explanation, I always make sure she hasn’t seen it before, and I don’t necessarily do it to make myself feel more manly or anything. Plus, I hadn’t done The Godfather yet, but it came up a bit later in a cursory manner (I went into way more detail here than I did in that conversation). Part of it was I saw myself in that joke, and when I related that to her, her reaction was to basically say she found it interesting that I saw myself in that moment. She wasn’t accusing me of anything, but what does it say about me that I saw myself in that joke and what does it say about The Godfather that it was the basis for the joke? Is it more of a guy thing? Who knows? I just know it’s at the top of the Stacker list for 100 greatest films.
All of which is a way of saying that I am done the Stacker Challenge. I’m not overly surprised. I do usually finish these challenges I give myself. But now I can have more time to do, well, other things. One of the joys of a challenge like this one is to find new films I have never seen before and discover something potentially awesome and cool. One of the downsides is I have seen so many “classic” films that I am more likely reviewing things I have seen before. That brings with it the additional challenge of finding something new to say. Easier in some instances than others. I liked the new angle I saw to Chinatown, but My Left Foot was particularly challenging since I had reviewed the film for this blog only about six months before I started the challenge and realized I had already said all of observations once before. The nature of the Stacker list also means the films, at least the American ones, tended to skew more to modern times. There’s nothing wrong with that, but there were more Pixar films than classic Disney, and Peter Jackson seems to have the same number of entries as Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese combined.
But one of the upsides to Stacker’s list was a lot of foreign language gems I might have never seen otherwise, perhaps most notably 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days and The Best of Youth. I finally saw some Kurosawa films that didn’t involve a samurai, something from Soviet silent film director Sergei Eisenstein, and one of the Three Colours trilogy. I’m not sure any other best of list would include a Batman film, but that suited be fine in the end because I had to find something I found interesting to say about something I have seen many times before. And that means if I in the future ever opt to do something like this again, I may just skip the ones I have written up in this format before. I’m at an age where I want to experience more new films than I do rewatch ones I’ve seen before. Oh sure, I’ll tune into something I like more than once, but given the option, I’d rather pick a new one. Who knows? I may find a new favorite that way, and no matter how much I love something like Casablanca, I can’t say there isn’t something else out there that I will adore even more if I never see it.
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