This Consummate, Quintessential World-Class Masterwork Is Head Over Heels Better Than The Dark Knight By a Long Shot, and You All Know It.

Rating: 10/10 (4 October 2008)

The Godfather soaks us up so dry it never has to hustle through. There is something in the deliberate journey of time as Don Corleone entrusts his reins of power that would have made an hour-and-forty-minute-long thriller unbecoming. Even at this length, there are characters in relationships you understand merely by the way they exchange looks, or don't, or speak to each other. We are inclined to associate with Don Corleone's family not because we enjoy their gang wars, but because we have been with them from the opening, where they celebrate a wonderful wedding full of old Italian songs, dances and love, and later we watch them await violence while sitting at the kitchen table and eating the pasta cooked by Clemenza.
Endowed with Nino Rota's immortal, extraordinary music score, this consummate masterpiece is entitled The Godfather, a title not only relevant because of the wise Don Vito Corleone, who heads his family with unruffled effectiveness, but also to his son Michael, a hesitant college graduate who is in the beginning feeling shame of his criminal background and firm on living the life of an upright citizen. Coppola follows Michael's ascent to power within the family, on top of the concurrent wearing away of his heart.
Vito Corleone himself is not even the central character in the drama. He is a relaxed puppeteer. The central character, really, slowly comes to be the youngest, smartest son, Michael, who absorbs the spirit of his father's standing while reworking his outdated customs. The Godfather's function in the family enterprise is illustrated by his name, existing outside the following generation which will continue and, with any luck, point the family into legal endeavors. Marlon Brando, who plays Vito as a perceptive, resilient model family man in his wise latter years, in fact has the character lead whereas Al Pacino, as Michael, is the lead. Unhurried and physically at ease, one knows his reaction would be of great anger if he were to be harassed. In the face of his grooming, which is given the least effort needed for a good, attractive look, there's a look about him as if he's just awakened, and that first groggy morning hour is the time he always seems to be stuck within. His presence is imprinted with a brooding, nonchalant style. Smooth and understated, he musters a searing inner fire that makes his tremendous character arc so impactful and amazing. But Brando's performance, as always, is expertly offhand, and it earned him an Oscar. His voice and physicality consciously lack precision, and the incidental result is of a man so at home with power that he no longer needs to prompt anyone.
The remaining actors furnish one case-in-point after another of superb, instinctive casting. Macho and tempestuous James Caan and pragmatic and down-to-earth Robert Duvall, for instance, hardly have to act to embody their roles. While this, the quintessential crime drama, is an extensive, painstakingly thorough film of nearly three hours, there genuinely isn't time to go into the personal history and distinctiveness of such characters as Clemenza (Richard Castellano), the hardened, heavyset family lieutenant, Jack Woltz (John Marley, who was excellent in Faces), the movie baron, Luca Brasi, the faithful contract killer, McCluskey (Sterling Hayden), the corrupt cop, and the rest. Coppola meets this issue head-on with unassuming typecasting. A character who appears in a story long enough to say hello and goodbye, no matter how small, better be real enough that you can assume who he votes for.
Really, the opening wedding sequence deeply familiarizes us with the dynamics of the family, an authoritarianism in the guise of Old World ceremony. Coppola asserts a style and a visual guise that is quintessential, through Gordon Willis's reddish-brown tinted, overexposed cinematography, everything period furnishings.
Men wearing black suits sitting in dark boardrooms parley the particulars of prostitution and gambling, and fashion an isolated society that issues stability and integrity, that is in terms of their own advantages. Politicians and policemen are merely intimidated or trafficked. Esteem and reliability are the legal tender, and all influence emerges from the Don, who calmly keeps quiet control over his territory.
His successor is Santino, the Caan role, always cooking with implicit rage and is incredibly eager to inherit the position. His brothers are Michael and the sniveling pushover Fredo, played by the late John Cazale. The Duvall role is Tom Hagen, the unemotional, factual family lawyer and all-around professional shrewd pragmatist embraced by Vito as a child and brought up as his own. The women are not much more than background scenery. Vito's wife scarcely speaks or even appears. Sonny's wife suffers silently through his shameless infidelity, and the Corleone daughter, Connie, played by Talia Shire, is so often overlooked that her brothers take no notice of her unless she protests about her disgusting husband having beaten her.
An assault on Vito's life alters Michael's attitude, and he comes back to help defend his family's wellbeing as Sonny takes rash control, making a mess of the business and laying everyone on the line, while the laid up and incapacitated Vito can do no more than look on. Michael's bona fide defining moment make its mark in one of the film's most unforgettable scenes of ultimate virtuosity. He takes it upon himself to do a hit at a small Italian restaurant, using a gun that was left for him in a bathroom stall. This forces him into banishment in Sicily, where he solidifies his determination to return his family to a status of eminence.