The Godfather does not come close to Goodfellas (Spoilers)

Rating: 6/10 (19 January 2003)

I am not able to discern much greatness here. Very slow to start it takes too much time to set the mood with period sets and as a consequence does not have the time to make us get into the characters, raise our interest for them. For a long time it is not really clear on which of the main characters the movie really focuses and we thus cannot invest ourselves in one of them, but have to watch in a rather detached way the "epic story" of an entire family, their general mafia business dealings which to me at least are nothing new. The focus on Michael which comes only after some time is achieved with a scene where as a loving son he saves his father, then with a rather inexplicable revenge act which starts an all out gang war, and finally with a cartoonish love story which is also an exploitation device: the one full frontal nudity shot is totally out of place, and I am not against sex on film in general (the scene is however a direct adoption of Mario Puzo's pulp style, so it's at least true to the original material). All this is hardly above cliche.
Compare this to Goodfellas, where Martin Scorsese lets us into the head of one single gangster. By concentrating on three friends and their ascent in the mob, the viewer is guided in an effective and engaging way. The exhilaration, the rewards, the madness, the brutality, the arrogance, the anxiety of the mob life are all presented and, using voice over, explained. The viewer gets to understand the motivation of the characters in depth. That Scorsese is a much more effective director than Coppola can be seen from a direct comparison of two scenes. In The Godfather, Sonny beats up his brother-in-law Carlo when he discovers that Carlo beats his wife. This is done in a somewhat drawn out, brutal but standard style, filmed from a relatively static viewpoint at a distance. The average viewer having witnessed hundreds of movie-brawls is most unimpressed. In Goodfellas, Henry knocks down the guy who was harassing his girlfriend in a very similar scene. However, set in a peaceful neighborhood and done in a much faster editing style, the violence comes as a shock and it's over before it has begun. When Henry concludes the encounter with a death threat and Karen in voice-over talks about how she gets excited by the behavior of her boy friend, Scorsese has created a lasting impression. Or, as another example, compare how food is treated, an obvious fetish for the Italian-Americans as portrayed in movies. Coppola treats us to an recipe explained on-screen by Clemenza and a few shots of dining tables and dishes full of food. Scorsese however continuously gives us close-ups of frying pans and people cooking and amassing foodstuffs, and, in the narration of the last day before Henry is arrested, makes the stirring of the tomato sauce into the calm eye of the storm. This is just a masterful characterization, giving 'flesh' to the topic and guaranteeing to leave everybody hungry.
The Godfather does have it's moments, of course, and it has a formidable cast. The problem is that they only have a pulp novel to play with, whereas in Goodfellas it's the true autobiographic material of a real life gangster.

Finally, I want to add that The Godfather is certainly not the ultimate masterpiece for Coppola. From a directorial standpoint he has achieved much much more with Apocalypse Now. In the end, however, Martin Scorsese is still a better director by far.