The Godfather Trilogy
Another example of movies that have had so much written about them that I consider it mostly a waste of my and your time to write about them from a critical perspective at great length aside from a very basic personal assessment of "The first one is really good, the second one is overrated, the third one is underrated." Which is why, rather than greatly elaborating on it, I'd much rather talk about the series as a whole and what I think it means.
The Godfather movies retell the history of the United States in the 20th Century as the history of organized crime. Primary viewpoint character throughout the series is Michael Corleone, played by Al Pacino. Michael is the son of underworld Kingpin Vito Corleone, famously played by Marlon Brando, a veteran of World War 2 and the member of the family that was meant to live a life on the straight and narrow. An assassination attempt on his father involves him in a gang war that eventually leads him to inherit his fathers position as the patriarch of the syndicate, broadly speaking the first movies plot, the development and decline of which the latter two movies chronicle.
The Godfather movies are, by most accounts, not a realistic depiction of organized crime and even on face value it's clear that their focus on the politicking between Cosa Nostra aristocracy and the way they are mostly glossing over the lives of the disposable grunts at the bottom makes for a fairly reductive depiction of the subject matter, but it's also clear that Godfather uses this setup of crime and family melodrama as a lense through which to view its particular slice of history.
The observations it all but spells out that the managerial side of organized crime is both inseparable from and widely identical to that of politics and business are rather trite and obvious and were probably hardly groundbreaking, even when it came out. What makes the series interesting is in how specifically it ties the history of the Corleone family to the history of the United States. Vito Corleone came to America as an immigrant with nothing to his name. He grew up in a lawless and neglected immigrant neighborhood in New York City. It's not despite but because of the fact that he pursued success outside of the law that that he and his family rose to a status of wealth and respect and became, however begrudgingly, part of the moneyed elite.
Michael, a war veteran and college educated prodigy, was supposed to leave the criminal side of the family business behind and make the name Corleone as clean and respectable as those of the descendants of all the Anglo, Germanic and Jewish robber barons that built the American Empire had become at this point, a pie in the sky he would pursue for the rest of his life. The realization that's spelled out in the third movie is , of course, that, the higher he ascended in terms of social status, the dirtier business became. Between young Vito Corleone who shot the previous kingpin in his squalid immigrant neighbourhood, something that public law enforcement and local politics would have dismissed as a bunch of greasy foreign peasants acting according to some inherent violent nature (as they still would now), young Michael who gunned down a rival and a corrupt cop in a restaurant as part of a family feud and old Michael who owns multiple businesses in Vegas and has shares in IBM, yet still has to sleep with one eye open lest he's the next one to catch a bullet, it is clear that earning respect while maintaining respectability would never be an option.
Which isn't to say that he's a fundamentally decent person or a victim of circumstance, no one in his position ever would be, but there's a certain tragedy to his sisyphean pursuit of legitimacy in which he never quite manages to face that even those who seem to have reached it are really just faking it. To the fact that even after working with the jewish businessmen and WASP senators and Swiss bankers and of all things, the Vatican, he believes there is some event horizon that he'll cross when there'll be an end to the blackmail and the threats and the backroom deals and the murders and the cover-ups. That he never quite manages to accept that that is all there is to it, all the way up.
Up to the end he believes that the exit will be finally there, after one last deal has been closed, one last competitor is taken out, that then he will be redeemed and along with him his legacy and his family name, while in reality it's only the scope that changes, never the nature and not even the methods.
In another great American trilogy, it's postulated that the oldest lie in America is that power can be innocent. The Godfather trilogy is, at the end of the day, all about the folly of finding absolution through the pursuit of power and wealth rather than in its refusal. Michael Corleone's fate was sealed, the moment he chose to involve himself in the family business rather than putting his college education to use to pursue a legitimate career that might have never seen him rise to heights of wealth and influence he accumulated throughout his life, yet might have also spared him the guilt and loss that came with it.
I could now conclude this by writing that the Godfather trilogy is about the false promise of the American Dream, which I'm aware, would be an unforgivable cliche. Even if it wouldn't be inaccurate. However, I prefer to say that it's about the impossibility to rise above a system built on the survival of the strongest. About believing that there is an end, to it, a way to come out on the other side, to "win" it and take that win to the bank and to use it to absolve yourself and your children from its corruption. Like so many stories we are expected to believe, it's a falsehood. The only way to break out of the cycle is to deny it completely. Maybe that's the only way not to lose everything that holds meaning to you.
Coming soon, my comparative analysis of the Godfather series and the No More Heroes series. (That was a joke, please don't hold me to it)
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