Sandwiched between the populist comedy of Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988) and the lurid fantasia machinery of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1990), Coppola returned to the narrative and characters he’s probably most famous for. Another way of saying it: between the experimentally-inclined innovator and the rococo desire magnet, the filmmaker returned to the story of a family man at odds with legitimacy itself.
Don’t the first two parts go down so easily? Not the matter of their stories, surely: these are horror films skinned atop charming corpses. But their texture, tempo, and motion are recognizable to any spectator weaned on spectacles of crime in America, on the psychologizing urges of 1970s New Hollywood, on the general theory of rises and falls. The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974) contain Actor’s Studio-style performances that — even as they would have felt mostly revelatory to American audiences coming out of Hollywood’s ‘60s — have been quickly adopted as inevitable facets of screen acting in 2024. Lee Strasberg sets the pace, first as an offscreen teacher to Pacino, then literally as his antagonist, Hyman Roth. From his methods flow Pacino’s controlled rot, Brando’s restrained rage, Cazale’s bone-deep squirm, a constellation of voices and gestures basically aspirational to performers like Jeremy Strong, Austin Butler, Tom Hardy. Beyond the acting styles, The Godfather duology sculpts a grand elegance of shadows and light, a cinematography that wants to be understood symbolically. The shape of the story poeticizes, in individual human behavior, the grander, sicker systemic rot of an America unable and unwilling to distinguish its existence as a dream from its reality as a nightmare occupation, a stolen land.
The first two portions of The Godfather are human films made by humans, about human behaviors. This entry — named in 1990 as the third part of a triptych and then, come 2020 and a re-cut, confessed to be coda — admits to the narrative’s artificial interests. Surely, it’s cathartic to behold the finale crash: the bullet’s wrong target, the silent scream, the long-promised and barely-earned death of Michael Corleone. Surely, too, The Godfather Part III occasions its director to appeal to every finished suburban basement’s framed photo of Pacino in shadow, to insist that these are horror films, that their very legibility makes impossible their fetishization as comforting — or worse, aspirational — objects. There can be no willed misreading of this end, even as Coppola morphs it in the 30 years between 1990 and 2020. If certain oblivious, plainly cruel, and mostly male spectators have historically managed to read The Godfather as a “cool” object, here, Michael dies plainly, in pain and blind, hurt and hurting forever. The coda is about characters (here, Michael) who have internalized the mythology of The Godfather and thought that building a life on such poison won’t leave them foaming and fungal.
Part III and Coda make obvious forms that crouch in corners, and Coppola and his collaborators accomplish this obviousness merely by performing obviously: “it’s opera.” Performances dial wildly up and down, all looking a little gauzed, a body haywired by blood sugar. A franchise drags itself so that it can never be a certain way again. In the processing, Coppola tips his heart’s gravity, not only in Dracula’s lurid meta-melodrama and the digital format confusion of Twixt (2011), but also the opera-as-monolith bust of Megalopolis (2024). Against the willed misreading of misogyny and violence as things to be excused away by spectacle, we need the performance of emotion itself in compositions as clear as they are intricate. Here, at the end, we need cords to bleed from exertion, not in moral exaltation but as the only reasonable decibel to approach America, a thing that draws its strength from belief, not realism. Against legitimacy, we need the feeling, the failing, of performance. To introduce bad taste into the mouth of production is to force a reaction, to wrench a change, finally, in finality, in the story we thought we knew.
Published as part of Francis Ford Coppola: As Big As Possible.
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