Agonising, overrated, what's all the fuss about?

Rating: 4/10 (5 September 2005)

Time and time again my friends berate me for not seeing this film and yet consider me to be something of a 'movie buff'. So they duly sat me down on Saturday night with a curry and the director's cut for my entertainment and delight.
All I can say is, there's 3 hours of my life I'm never going to get back. Don't get me wrong; I'm a big fan of gangster movies, I've studied some of the early Cagney/Robinson films and seen most of the more important ones: Scarface, Casino, Goodfellas - I even stayed awake through Once Upon A Time In America. But The Godfather was agonising. Slow, meandering, overly-complicated, lacking punch - what it lashed out in bullets and horses heads, it certainly lacked in dynamite. Watching The Godfather is the cinematic equivalent of the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds; 30 years on it's impossible to see why on earth it was considered so ground-breakingly new and exciting. But by all accounts Coppolla was making a brave movie here, reintroducing a genre stuck in the 1920's and lavishing 168 minutes on the minutiae of one Mafia family.
And lavish it he does. The only thing I can say in its defence is that the production design was superb, it lacked for nothing, the overall look of the film was excellent. The budget must have been colossal. What a pity the plot and the dialogue didn't live up to its promise. With a cast so huge and impressive as well, it's twice as pitiful.
The legendary Marlon Brando couldn't fail to disappoint - the poor man's legend - in my opinion - far exceeded his talent. I understand the director begged Brando to come out of retirement for this, although I kind of wish he'd stayed there. His incessant mumbling, padded cheeks and all, peering out of dark corners and scratching his face just had me turning the volume way up high and becoming increasingly frustrated. Diane Keaton just played Diane Keaton/Annie Hall (her real name, trivia hounds)as usual, with an increasingly terrible haircut. She looked like she wasn't sure what she was doing in the movie any more than we did, she just looked like she wanted to go home. Her relationship with Pacino totally lacked chemistry and I found his return to her from Sicily as a widower highly unbelievable. Even Pacino's 'thunderbolt' relationship with Apollonia seemed contrived and wooden - I know he's meant to be a hard man but he remained so poker-faced throughout the movie I lost any feelings of sympathy for him.
The best part I felt was played by James Caan, whose character was labelled as 'hot tempered' by his father (is that what it takes to be interesting within the Corleone family?!) so of course he met a predictably sticky end like a lot of the better characters. I found a lot of the meandering plot very predictable - to the extent where I was annoying my die-hard fans who put on the show for me, but I couldn't help it: "Something tells me Apollonia isn't going to get out of that car" etc. The plot didn't really go anywhere, it just seemed to be setting itself up for that sequel; every 20 minutes or so Brando/Pacino were inviting people to take advantage of 'an offer they couldn't refuse'. It was laughable.
Other than Caan's, none of the characters were the slightest bit appealing; the outrageous behaviour of Tommy in Scorsese's Goodfellas, for example, is counterbalanced by his likable personality: you're laughing in spite of yourself. Pacino's protagonist in Scarface is the same - snorting copious amounts of cocaine and waving a gun around - you still care about the guy, however monstrous he's become. But Pacino in The Godfather was just a cartoon bad-ass, like the rest of them, identikit baddies with no depth whatsoever, no remorse, no weakness, no humanity, no growth. When Brando stumbles to his death among the tomato plants in play with his grandson I take that to mean that Coppolla was showing us Vito had a heart but really, it was too little too late.
Coppolla may well have been brave in 1972 to reintroduce a decidedly unfashionable genre on a conservative audience, and for the time it might have been a breath of fresh air, but the glamour and pace of subsequent, better, gangster fare puts The Godfather in the shade, however responsible the film may be for the genre's future output.