visual wine

Rating: 9/10 (18 October 2009)

My father made me watch this with him when I was 17. At first I was put off by the seemingly slow pace. But gradually the vast canvas and the gorgeous visuals began to draw me in. I had never expected that an 'old' film would be so beautiful to look at. At the end my father asked me what I thought of it. I replied that it was 'bigger' than anything I had ever seen before, but I also felt that it lacked depth. Thats when my father hit me with it : he pointed out for my benefit that "you're not allowed to have an opinion on this film." At 17, I used to think that having an opinion about something was a democratic and reasonable thing.
With this film, Coppola managed to articulate notions & myths about the Italian Mafia, notions that had existed for decades but had never been so artistically depicted before, at least not in films. No mainstream picture before had ever depicted the mafia in anything deeper than black-&-white stereotypes of good and evil. The production design, photography, the performances and Nino Rota's score are so perfectly welded together that you never doubt for a moment that the world within the film EXISTS.
I'm sure intellectuals have a field day with this film. A psychologist would detect seething undercurrents of homoeroticism, combined with a feudal & patriarchal mindset. A film analyst would probably criticise the straightforward storytelling style, as opposed to a twisting & warped narrative format of the noir convention, where the viewer changes what is viewed. A philosopher would berate the film for having no depth or inherent meaning, and its characters for lacking any real consciousness of themselves or the world. The film has one singular idea : the rationalizing of murder by calling it "business, not personal", which is appalling.
I still think this is the best monument of popular culture, over time as well as place. It is the ultimate elevation of style over substance, but undeniably the film is tastefully made. There are moments in this film that nobody forgets : the opening marriage scene, the decapitated horse, the meeting of the five families, and of course every single scene that Marlon Brando is in. To my mind, the Godfather is probably the best compromise we've yet seen between art and commerce.