i’m with you now
by Douglas Messerli
Mario
Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola (screenplay, based on a fiction by Mario Puzo),
Francis Ford Coppola (director) The
Godfather / 1972
Suddenly
in facing writing about one of my favorite films, The Godfather, I become stumped. Not because it’s a “difficult”
film to discuss; it’s absolutely a straight-forward work, with an easily recountable
plot, which is central to the form of this narrative “gangster” film. But to
simply focus on the story would do a great injustice to this complex work.
The first third of the movie (at least it
feels that way) is devoted to a lavish wedding
that is meant to be demonstrable evidence that Don Corelone (Marlon Brando) is
a wealthy being, willing to lavish everything on his beloved daughter, Connie
(Talia Shire), and his large community of “friends.” Ironically, he himself must
spend hours during the immense celebration in a dark room, listening to the
demands of some of these “friends,” or want-to-be friends about their
sufferings as they seek his blessings and answers to their problems. One, in
particular, a small-time undertaker, Bonasera, complains of the rape of his own
daughter by young American boys; he wants revenge. The Godfather’s entire
position is laid out before us in his response; the supplicant has first sought
justice in American courts rather than attempting adjudication—most often
violent—through the more palatial court of the Don himself. Money is not
required, but absolute devotion and later demands for services are. In short,
once you sell yourself to the devilish Don, you are his servant for the rest of
your life.


Yet Michael is at the heart of this
entire family, father, mother, sister, brother, friends: he is their “spoiled
prince,” the emblem of what they are as a family. And unless you recognize this
at the very beginning of this powerful movie, you will never understand the tragedies
that lie within the narrative of the remainder of the first move and the other
films following. Michael, is the beloved family member who must remain an
outsider. And for the first several scenes in this film that is how he
perceives himself, the protestant school teacher, Kay, being the perfect mate
for him, despite their obvious differences.
Most of the rest of this nearly
encyclopedic fiction, including all the complex plot intricacies that take the
film and its later manifestations through the family’s rise in New York with
returns to Sicily and Rome, including the Vatican City, are almost tangential
to the central story: Michael’s Faustian pact with the devil.
In short, it hardly matters “what
happens” for the rest of the story. Of course, it does very much matter in
terms of the cinematic experience of Coppola’s beautifully filmed myth. It’s
Christmas 1945, Michael and Kay shopping in the lush stores of midtown New
York. They’ve just enjoyed a film at Rockefeller Center and have been shopping
at the stores thereabouts. How could they have known that in the days following
the wedding, Michael’s father, meeting with another outsider, “The Turk,” (Al
Lettieri), backed by the Corleones' rivals, the Tattaglias, another crime
family, had rejected his offer to the Corleone’s to become involved with drugs?
How could they have known of Sonny’s impetuous interruption of his father’s
careful rejection, which has made it clear that there are cracks in the family
ideologies? The details, in some respects, are insignificant to the larger
rhythms of the film. Suddenly Kay notices the newspaper headlines: Don Corelone
has been “hit,” is possibly dead.
One might say it is at the very moment
that plot is swept up into the psychological portraiture that Coppola has established,
as Michael, with no other alternative, returns to the family circle, the
purposeful family outsider returning to the den, a house presented in Coppola’s
designer’s set as a kind of cave a warm-lighted room where the men are in
control, but the women hover over them. It is a world right out of myth, particularly
Sicilian life.
Their discussions remind one of a war-time
movie, plans of attack being intensely debated. Michael, the ex-soldier, is an
expert warrior. Although he is kept out of the early discussions, the absence
of his father allows him to reenter family conversations from which he has
previously been purposely excluded. Still, basically he is ostracized, remains
the outsider. Sonny and Tom are in charge.
A visit to the hospital, however, one of
the most tense scenes in Coppola’s work, changes everything. Strangely enough,
little happens in this desolate world which Michael suddenly uncovers. The large,
unlit structure is suddenly empty, all guards, nurses, doctors (one cannot even
imagine doctors within this space), all ancillary help has disappeared. If
there was ever a vision of a collapsed center, here it is. No one is where all
of us expect everyone to be, protecting, doctoring, bringing people to health.
There seem not to be even any patients—except one, Don Corelone, all alone, a
single nurse still there despite the abandonment. All have been told to
evacuate the place. We follow Michael’s traumatic recognition of the events.
Clearly, enemies (one must be paranoid, obviously, having grown up in the world
that Michael has) have emptied the public space in order to kill Corelone. With
the help of the dawdling worker Michael transfers his suffering father to another
room, ordering a surprised and subservient visitor to the Don to stand by the
entrance, pretending to have a gun.
The entire scene, with its echoing
emptiness is one of the most dramatic scenes in the film, perhaps in all of
cinema. Yet its quietude represents one of the most frightening moments in
cinematic history. As Michael moves his father to another room in order to
protect him from inevitable “hit,” the Don confusedly awakens, Michael assuring
him, “I’m with you now,” a simple pledge of protection which, in the context of
the entire film, is also a commitment to evil. A tear falls from his father’s
eye in recognition of what has just occurred. All the family hopes for
Michael’s separateness have suddenly vanished.
Michael does not comprehend what that
statement implies, nor, I might suggest, did I upon first viewing: Michael, the
purposeful representation of family “salvation,” has, perhaps unintentionally,
but most certainly, become one of them
and all the evil acts the family has committed.

An escape to the beautiful Sicilian
landscape and Michael’s sudden love and marriage with a stunning local beauty
only reiterates the pattern: love and death, revenge and revenge again. The
small town of Corelone has no males left. Michael—whose beautiful young wife is
blown up in a car explosion intended for him—can no longer comprehend his own
devolution, his commitment to his own
and everyone else’s destruction. When he returns to the US, his “new” life
serves only as a repetition of the revenge tragedy filled with lies, as he
manipulates the death of all his enemies, including Connie’s double-crossing—he
has been indirectly involved with the attempted killing of Don Corelone—and
wife-beating husband whose marriage the movie celebrated so enthusiastically in
its early frames.
While avowing his commitment to serve as
godfather to Connie’s newborn son, Michael takes on the larger role of Godfather,
killing most of those who have betrayed the family, including the child’s
father. Murders in Las Vegas assure the family’s takeover of the city’s major
casino. Michael is no longer an individual but is a monster created by his family’s
very attempts to protect him from becoming one. The infection, as his wife Kay
later reports, seems to be somehow in the blood, embedded in the ritual
Sicilian commitment to eternal revenge, dooming generation after generation.
As the Don dies the natural death of a
heart attack, we realize that, despite the family’s great wealth, there can be
no enjoyment in that fact. One need only think back to the small New Jersey house of the Don’s early associate, Clemenza, to
realize that crime does not truly pay, that the wealth these figures might have
sought is really a search for power that ultimately has no effect. If they have
survived, it has given them little joy of life. An imprisonment of mattresses
and homemade spaghetti is surely not what they originally sought.
Los Angeles,
October 12, 2012
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