“Your sins are terrible, and it is just that you suffer. Your life could be redeemed, but I know you do not believe that. You will not change.”
Here I look back at one of Francis Ford Coppola’s more divisive entries—a followup to one of the most iconic entries in American cinema, period. The original Godfather still remains a masterclass of acting, lighting, and quotability—casting a long shadow over the crime genre for decades. It’s a little harder to appreciate now, but it can’t be understated how much it flipped the gangster movie on its head at that point—and also inverted the typical hero’s journey you see in Hollywood, with its arc of breaking the character of Michael Corleone (played then in a surprisingly understated way by the legendary Al Pacino) into merciless crime boss.
Of course, there comes the questions of how much it glamorizes the mafia life, which the sequel attempted to address somewhat—and then twenty years later, we had a followup with an aged Pacino with this one, lacking some of the former players that made the first so so memorable. Question is, how well do I think Godfather III stands despite that?
Surprisingly well, for the most part—with the caveat that you do have to take it in a pretty different way than the first two. Whereas before we had up close and personal street action with gangster hits and bloody executions, here instead we go into a world of white collar crime and business conspiracy—but in the process Coppola did twist things enough to turn away from fantasies of made men in fine suits into something really digging into what really reaps from such a life.
Set two decades after the first much as it was made, this one is set in 1979 with Michael Corleone now well into middle age, with a daughter (played by Sofia Coppola, which we’ll get to), trying to shift himself into legitimate business. Part of this involves an investment deal via none other than the Vatican bank, brokered by an archbishop (Donal Donnelly), with him giving speeches before Wall Street and everything. Of course, despite this, Michael still has to contend with his old connections in the Mafia world less keen for him to just walk out so easily—with debts and insults still to be paid, things spiral into conspiracies involving assassination reaching all the way into the Holy See itself.
Off the bat we see how the film examines just how the crime syndicates of old were sidelined somewhat by the more banal yet more profitable excesses of finance itself—earlier on Michael is condescended to by a group of European businessmen who are determined to see him simply as a figurehead for their investment opportunities. Businesses that were once the realm of the underworld are now legal, the drug trade is taking over, and the glamor the Corleone Family held is fading alongside ageing and greying Capos. And even they, it seems, are no less vulnerable to more modern ways of blunt hostile takeovers, like machine-guns from helicopters—a grim contrast to the up close and personal shootings in the first.
That leaves Michael feeling like a way more vulnerable figure—one caught between those yet more powerful than himself, and even between the younger but more rabid generation of mafioso represented by his stepson Vincent (Andy Garcia), unafraid to tear into markets he kept away from. Pacino doesn’t command the stage like he did in the first two, but that’s the point—by now, he’s made his own bed, and it turns out there is no walking into the sunset with piles of ill-gotten gains.
The main weakness I feel that gave the film a mixed reaction on release is the rest of the cast—we do somewhat miss players like Robert Duvall as advisor Tom Hagen, and those that are introduced here aren’t as memorable. The focus then comes over to Pacino, who certainly does his best, even if Michael is by choice not as commanding here. Sofia Coppola…honestly is adequate but not terrible, coming off as honestly a rather realistic portrayal of someone sheltered and made naive by her family’s wealth. Someone who does steal the show a little better is Raf Vallone as a certain Cardinal soon to ascend to Pope-hood (the film ties into the real life death of John Paul I, albeit in a rather fictionalized way, playing off one of the more conspiratorial theories around his death).
So what the film lacks somewhat in cast power, I do feel personally it makes up for in theme—contrasting Vatican holiness with very human corruption, what happens when a big fish is tossed into a far bigger pond, and ultimately, just what it takes to really kill a man inside. Here we talk about the recent recut, marking the film as less of its own instalment and more of a Coda—the Death of Michael Corleone. Most changes are minor but there are a few key differences, among them the last scene—the original, let’s just say, had more of a sense of finality, but the recut does mirror the ending of the first film in a bleak way that shatters what feelings of power and gain one may have felt from it.
All in all, that leaves the final Godfather part for me a film that lags behind others but is still by no means bad—and does remain a contrast of sorts to other films that do ironically satirize but also somewhat glamorize the lucrative world of financial law-flouting. Ultimately, all the suits, all the guns and cannoli don’t stop a legacy destroyed—which, for many, matters above all…
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