The Godfather (1972)

Third viewing (previous one was on May 17, 2003).

The film starts immediately after World War II, and focuses on a family of Italian-Americans who control illegal activities like gambling and prostitution in the East Coast. The head of the family is Don Vito, and the film shows how his son Michael, initially destined to be the family's bridge to legitimate activities, ends up getting into crime himself and becomes the successor of his father. The film also shows the dilemma faced by the family concerning the drug trade, and how they decide to move to the West Coast.

A necessarily dull exposition of machiavellian strategies and tactics, with all its sordid details. Apart from the elementary political science education provided by watching it, there is also the intrinsic pleasure derived from well-staged set-pieces (Don Vito's death is my favorite). The film doesn't explicitly account for the changes in Michael's behavior. In the beginning of the film, he says to his girlfriend that he has nothing in common with his family, and then he changes completely to a zealous mafioso. One possibility is that he wasn't being sincere, just as he was not sincere in the end, to the same person. Another is that there was a vacuum that could only be filled by him, and blood ties did the rest. A recurring pattern in the film is the problem of getting the truth from someone. People are led to confess by several psychological tricks which necessarily involve a level of naïveté on their part (e.g., Carlo's confession). This is a requirement of the drama which wouldn't necessarily find a counterpart in reality. In fact, this is perhaps the film's biggest problem. One tries to be realistic, and sacrifices a good deal of the movie's dynamics to achieve it, but can only go so far. As a result, one ends up with a flawed realism, and a lot of dullness. I may only wonder about the reasons about this film's popularity. A very wild guess is that the essentially anti-liberal politics it puts on display may have found an echo among American audiences back in 1972. The stark contrast between a so-called democratic society that was sending its sons to die in Vietnam in the name of universal values, and the dictator embodied by Don Vito, who was ruthless to his enemies but acted as a protector to those under his wings may have signaled that a particularistic moral system is better and more honest than a universalistic one.

Rating: 65 (down from 70)