Film review

‏Francis Ford Coppola (1990)

This was a saddening film even in prospect:  the reasons that impelled Francis Ford Coppola to make it were all too clear.  The four films that Coppola directed in the 1970s (The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather: Part II and Apocalypse Now) had combined box-office takings of $498m against an aggregate production budget of $53m.  Each one made money.  The seven films he directed in the 1980s (excluding his segment of the New York Stories anthology) cost $159m and recouped $128m.  Only one of them, Peggy Sue Got Married, turned a profit.   The most notorious flop was One from the Heart (1982), which earned less than a million dollars from a $26m budget[1].  As a result, Coppola was forced to sell Zoetrope Studios in 1983 and spent the rest of the decade working to pay his debts.

I saw The Godfather Part III on its original release but hadn’t seen it again, unlike its two predecessors.  With BFI showing all three movies this autumn, I felt I should revisit the last Godfather.  Although it certainly served its commercial purpose (taking $137m, two-and-a-half times its costs), it has a widespread negative reputation – to the extent that many admirers of the first two films[2], me included, think of the Godfather as a duology, not a trilogy.  This isn’t just an arbitrary dismissal of the third film:  it reflects a genuine belief that, as Pauline Kael wrote at the start of her review of it, ‘At the end of The Godfather Part II …, the story was complete – beautifully complete’.   I went into the BFI screening of Godfather 3 hoping to come out thinking the film wasn’t as black as it’s painted.   Watching it left me shocked on two counts:  first, that the film is much worse than I remembered; second, that I retained so little memory of it.  I think the two things must be related and that I wanted to forget it.

The story is set in 1979, nearly twenty years after the end point of Godfather 2.  Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) now donates large sums from his huge fortune to charity.  He’s attempting both to complete the legitimisation of his criminal empire and to assuage persisting guilt about the death of his brother Fredo, which Michael ordered.  Beneficiaries of his largesse include the Catholic Church.  Godfather 3 opens with his receipt of a papal honour in recognition of his services to the Church.  A big family party to mark the award follows, at Michael’s New York home.  The party is the scene-setting equivalent of Connie Corleone’s wedding, which begins Godfather 1, and Anthony Corleone’s first communion celebrations at the start of Godfather 2.  Right from the outset, though, there are signs that Coppola has lost his touch.

The Vatican honour isn’t implausible per se.  Michael’s philanthropy was publicly acknowledged even at the start of Godfather 2.  Illustrations of the Corleones’ observance of Catholic rituals recur throughout both earlier films.  Yet the short papal award sequence at the start of Godfather 3 pushes these themes together to somehow camp effect – you want to laugh.  Even before this, Michael’s voice has read aloud a letter to his ‘dear children’ that makes clear he rarely sees them nowadays.  Again, there’s nothing wrong in principle with Coppola and Mario Puzo (who again shares the screenplay credit) using voiceover, although they didn’t need to in Godfathers 1 and 2.  But it’s soon clear that the purpose of voiceover here is merely to supply information of a kind that would previously have been conveyed in dialogue.  Anthony (Franc D’Ambrosio) and Mary (Sofia Coppola) now live with their mother Kay (Diane Keaton), from whom Michael is divorced.  Since all three of them are at his papal honour bash, the voiceover letter is otiose.

This opening party is the first of several episodes in which Coppola strains to revive past glories.   Even so, it’s one of the better bits of Godfather 3:  you’d never guess from it how bad things get by the closing stages.  Things go wrong for several reasons or, rather, a single fundamental reason that is manifested in several ways:  Coppola’s loss of conviction.  The root cause of this movie may have been One from the Heart but that’s not a phrase to apply to Godfather 3, except in a degraded sense.  The major defects include an awkward over-reliance on factual material, indifferent storytelling and characterisation, and – even more incredible in light of the earlier Godfathers – plenty of problematic acting.

Coppola and Puzo made imaginative use of historical situations and personnel in the first two films – the New York ‘Five Families’ feuds, Meyer Lansky as the inspiration for Hyman Roth.  The dependence on news stories in Godfather 3 is crude and clumsy.  The papal honour to Michael is only the start of the Vatican presence in the film, a large part of whose plot draws on, and connects to the Corleones’ schemes, the short-lived papacy of John Paul I (Albino Luciani), the conspiracy theories concerning his death and the ‘God’s banker’ scandal.  Mario Puzo’s original novel The Godfather was widely regarded as a mere potboiler and Coppola’s achievement in bringing it to the screen admired as an elevating transformation (the title of Pauline Kael’s review of Godfather 1 is ‘Alchemy’).   It’s an unhappy irony that the Vatican elements have the effect of a return to the material’s trashy origins.  The ‘Year of Three Popes’ and the Banco Ambrosiano scandal were very recent events and hardly susceptible to plausible fictionalising in the context of a story – the Corleones’ story – that hadn’t previously leant on sensational media headlines in this way.  To distance itself from the actual details, Godfather 3 adjusts the timeframe and the names of the real people.  Albino Luciani died in 1978 and Roberto Calvi in 1982.  Now Cardinal Luciani is Cardinal Lamberto (Raf Vallone) and Calvi is Frederick Keinszig (Helmut Berger).  Both die within the 1979-80 timeframe of the film’s plot.  Yet Lamberto, on his election as Pope, takes the name John Paul I!  The overall effect is messy, verging on ridiculous.

Michael Corleone is portrayed as a deeply troubled man whose advancing age and ill health are making him anxious about the fate of his eternal soul.  This might be a reasonable set-up for a de novo drama about a sixtyish Mafia boss and could even have passed muster in the case of Vito Corleone.  But the character of Michael that developed so strongly in the first two films – a professional killer who was cold-blooded yet self-aware – makes his personality change in Godfather 3 weightless and unconvincing.    There are moments here that present him as a gutsy, beloved old warhorse.  The methodical, charmless Michael was never that – he commanded fearful respect without affection.   The received wisdom is that, by the late 1980s. Coppola so reproached himself for ‘sacrificing’ personal life and relationships for the sake of the film-making that consumed him that he identified with Michael (so that the movie is, in the above-mentioned ‘degraded sense’, ‘one from the heart’).  If so, it’s unfortunate that he expressed their kinship in a way that also sacrificed Michael’s credibility.  Though Al Pacino gives an honourable performance, it makes for uncomfortable viewing.  The impression Pacino creates brings to mind a horror or sci-fi story in which, though physically recognisable to those who knew him before, a person’s inner self has been kidnapped.

The plotting includes several improbable contrivances.  At the opening party, there’s tension between Michael and Anthony about the latter’s future career:  Michael wants his son to be a lawyer; Anthony wants to be a professional opera singer.  ‘What happens if you fail?’ Michael asks.  ‘I won’t fail’, Anthony replies and he doesn’t.  Within a few months, he’s got the tenor lead in Cavalleria rusticana.   It’s remarkable that his mother Kay doesn’t turn a hair about the venue for this performance – far from it.  Anthony, she informs Michael, is ‘doing really well.  He’s gotten some very good notices, and he’s going to be making his operatic debut, in Sicily in Palermo, this Easter’.  This is the woman who, in Godfather 2, after telling her husband she’d had an abortion because she couldn’t bear to bring another child of his into the world, concludes with:  ‘I knew … there would be no way you could ever forgive me, not with this Sicilian thing that goes back two thousand years-‘.  That’s as far as Kay gets before Michael hits her.  It’s a memorable scene that exposes as unlikely, to put it mildly, the rapprochement between her and Michael which now occupies a sizeable part of the story.  This seems to reflect little more than that, in the years since Godfather 2, Diane Keaton had become a major star, qualifying for a meatier role than she’d had in the first two films.

Whereas this seems careless (or couldn’t care less) on Coppola’s part, a central strand of Godfather 3 is a serious attempt to reconnect the family story with its 1940s phase.  A major new character is Vincent Mancini (Andy García), the illegitimate son of Santino (Sonny) Corleone.  Vincent, whose mother is Lucy Mancini (Jeannie Linero), is presumably the fruit of Sonny’s quickie with Lucy during his sister Connie’s wedding in Godfather 1.   It’s not exactly a compliment to say that the impulsive Vincent is believably the son of his father:  Andy García, like James Caan as Sonny, is charismatic but limited.   What isn’t believable is Vincent’s transformation from a hothead into a ruthlessly calculating homicidal brain – that is, from Sonny’s son into Michael’s adopted son.  Vincent ends his romance with Mary, after pressure from Michael to do so.  The latter eventually appoints Vincent Santino Corleone his successor as Don.

Godfather 1 and Godfather 2 represent a high-water mark of American film acting.  It’s not surprising that members of the Godfather 3 cast who hadn’t appeared in either of the previous films felt keenly the privilege and the challenge of a Godfather role.  The upshot of this is variously disappointing, even allowing that the newcomers’ parts aren’t as well written as their predecessors’ were.  As the elderly gangster Don Altobello, Eli Wallach gives an overelaborate, theatrical turn:  he looks to be going flat out for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination (that didn’t materialise, though it did for Andy García).  The same is true of Donal Donnelly as the eccentrically foxy Archbishop Gilday.  On the other hand, Franc D’Ambrosio’s Anthony is merely dull.  Adverse criticism of the acting at the time of the film’s release was centred almost exclusively on Sofia Coppola’s Mary and the ‘nepotism’ of casting her:  the few trophies the film won included her brace of Golden Raspberry  awards as Worst Supporting Actress and Worst New Star.  This was outrageously unjust.  Sofia Coppola is occasionally awkward and her voice less than well modulated but she makes Mary’s innocence more affecting than most of what goes on in the film.   When Vincent takes Mary’s hand to show her how to roll pasta dough for gnocchi, it’s one of the freshest moments, as well as the most sensuous, in the whole of Godfather 3.

The worst moments are when you can’t believe the film is directed by the person who made Godfather 1 and Godfather 2.   Two of the worst examples are a feast day bloodbath that brings to mind but gets nowhere near to emulating the Feast of Saint Rocco episode in Godfather 2; and a sequence in which a helicopter hovers over, before opening fire on, a conference room full of mob bosses.  At least it puts an end to the creaky acting by most of this gathering.  (The noise of the helicopter seems almost a joke reference to Apocalypse Now.)   At a party in Sicily ahead of Anthony’s big night, Michael mispronounces Cavalleria rusticana and his son corrects him in public (as if).  Anthony then takes up a guitar and serenades his father with the famous Godfather love theme while the screen shows a flashback to Michael’s long-ago wedding to Apollonia.  Back in the present, he sheds tears at the memory.  Those tears put the seal on thr cheesiness of the whole scene.

A night at the opera in Sicily, where the son of a legendary Mafia boss has a starring role:  what could possibly go wrong?   This climax is the logical culmination of the film’s strenuous connection of touchstones of Italian-American culture – family, church, opera.  The choice of Cavalleria rusticana may have larger significance than this but it’s hard to forget that Martin Scorsese used music from the same to score Raging Bull.  Is Coppola acknowledging his own loss of status as number one Italian-American auteur?  Perhaps but he also apparently wants, in this final part of Godfather 3, to top the cross-cutting climaxes of Godfather 1 and Godfather 2.  The over-extended result plays like a parody of those fine sequences.  Coppola moves between the action on stage and off.  Vincent’s men abduct Keinszig and hang him from a bridge, making his death look like suicide.  Connie Corleone (Talia Shire) gives Don Altobello (her godfather!) a box of poisoned cannoli as a birthday gift and watches him die in his opera box.  Archbishop Gilday serves Pope John Paul I poisoned tea, also with fatal results.  Al Neri (Richard Bright) takes a train to the Vatican, where he shoots Gilday.  This list of the killings that take place in the course of Mascagni’s one-act opera is not exhaustive.  On the steps of the theatre after the performance, a bullet intended for Michael hits Mary instead.  She dies in her father’s arms, eliciting from him one of those silent screams that directors tend to reserve for the greatest screen tragedies but which seldom work because they actually scream self-importance.  By the time Al Pacino’s howls are actually heard, it’s too late:  Diane Keaton’s more naturally appalled reaction has more impact.

The opera mayhem gives way to a very brief epilogue.  Years later (to judge from Pacino’s bad make-up), Michael sits alone in the garden of a villa.  He slumps in his chair and an orange falls from his hand.  The piece of fruit is the only thing about this death scene that compares with Vito Corleone’s in Godfather 1.  I’d barely suppressed a laugh when Michael received the papal honour at the start of Godfather 3.  When he keels over at the end, it’s even more risible but I couldn’t make a sound.  A silent laugh, then, and right enough:  this movie is a major black joke of cinema history.   Something else was audible, though.  As Michael Corleone breathes his last, Francis Ford Coppola’s sigh of relief comes through loud and clear.  He has got to the end of a film that he never wanted to make.

7 October 2018

[1] These figures, rounded up and down to the nearest million, are all taken from individual Wikipedia entries on the films in question.   They don’t, of course, give a complete picture.  The current figures may include video rental sales etc.  The colossal total profits of the 1970s films are mostly down to one of them, The Godfather.  Even so, the figures give a flavour of Coppola’s vertiginous rise and fall as a commercially successful film-maker.

[2] Referred to as Godfather 1 and Godfather 2 throughout this note – hence Godfather 3 …