A completely engaging melodrama that casts its net a little too wide

Rating: Null/10 (14 June 2002)

For some years I have avoided getting around to see The Godfather.

Such is its reputation, one is afraid to spoil the almost mythical aura that surrounds the film by doing anything as pedestrian as watching it.

But watch it I have, and it is now easy to see why this epic has captured the imagination of so many people.
A sweeping family melodrama, it is completely engaging and replete with stunning performances from the cast.
Nevertheless, the first-time viewer cannot help feeling a little cheated. So much is left unexplored, so many years glossed over without adequate explanation or credible character development.
What is missing in the main is a sense of how and why Michael turned around so completely in the last two thirds of the film.
From the point at which he becomes a murderer for the first time in a small family restaurant (a scene that stands alone as a masterpiece of direction), the film begins to rattle through events at an ever-increasing pace.

At what point does Michael acquire the confidence that allows him to risk exposure in Sicilly simply in order to bully the father of a potential suitor (who soon becomes his wife)?
What led him to contact Kay for the first time in years, 12 months after his return to New York? Where is the warmth and passion in their rekindled relationship? We don't see any evidence of it: one moment he is demanding she marry him, the next they have children and he is fully wrapped in the business of running the family's affairs? Why don't we see her response to the inevitable discovery that Michael has since been married (and widowed)? Why does this strong and relatively independent woman so passively accept her role as mobster's put upon, excluded, untrusted spouse, a transformation completed in the closing moments of the film?
Is it because her love for Michael is so intense? If so then show us, it is too important a feature of the film for Coppola to ignore.

At its best, The Godfather is in a class of its own as an example of cinematic genius. At its worst, it comes across like an upmarket TV mini-series.
Perhaps the greatest testament to the director's success in this case is that the film could easily have stretched to four or even five hours and still continued to maintain the viewers' attention. Perhaps then we would have seen many of these loose threads tied up to our satisfaction.
3/5