Film Friday: The Godfather (1972)

Back to the 1970’s! Today, I’m going to talk about The Godfather and how my view of it has changed over time. For the longest time, I wasn’t really a fan of this film. It seemed deeply flawed and dull. But I’ve since learned how to watch this movie. Interestingly, more than any other film I’ve seen except Scott Pilgrim v. The World, you need to understand how to watch this film for it to work.

The Godfather was a worldwide phenomena. Baby Boomers LOVE this film. Many of them rate it as one of the ten best films ever. Most film critics agree. I don’t. My generation got to compare it to Goodfellas, and Goodfellas is an amazing film. It does everything right. Moreover, it does everything right that The Godfather does wrong. Consider this...

The characters in Goodfellas are some of the most alive and memorable on film. I can rattle off their names off the top of my head without having seen the movie in years. By comparison, the characters in Godfather are mostly dull, slow, old and forgettable. Many of them feel like they are just waiting to die.

Moreover, Goodfellas is packed with really cool camera work that actually becomes part of the movie. All I need to say is “the mobster introduction scene” and most people will think of that amazing tracking shot where we follow young Henry Hill (now played by Ray Liotta) as he makes his way through the restaurant introducing all the mobsters he knows. This is an incredible piece of work as it goes on and on and you marvel at how the director could have set this up so the camera could weave its way through this tight club to let each of the characters introduce themselves.

Godfather has nothing like this. In fact, Godfather is shot in such an amazingly bland and straight forward manner that it has come to feel a lot like a made-for-tv movie; it suffers that it is shot in an identical style as so many of the miniseries of the time. Indeed, not only is the camera work entirely generic, but there are no risks taken with the lighting, no risks taken with the staging, and no risks taken with the soundtrack.

Compare that with Goodfellas which is the first film outside of musicals to truly integrate the soundtrack as a means to light up a scene and mark the passing of time, or how it uses time warps to give scenes a sense of tension (slow motion killing of Samuel L. Jackson from multiple angles) or how its characters hover in unusual places for interesting shots. Think of the bar scene where the two enemy-camps-to-be are twenty feet apart talking down the bar. Had this been done in Godfather, the characters would all be huddled together center stage. Put simply, there is nothing innovative in Godfather, but Goodfellas is innovative from start to finish.

The Godfather story simultaneously feels too dense and too shallow. It is dense because it digs too deeply into too many characters, which makes the plot feel convoluted and full of filler. Yet, at the same time, the story it tells overall feels very narrow. It feels like it is only barely touching on the mafia world. Goodfellas, by comparison, has a driving plot – the life of Henry Hill, it disdains filler, and it weaves the world of the mafia perfectly into the story through the plot and the narrative. The result is that Godfather feels dull, ponderous, and unfulfilling, whereas Goodfellas feels like a wild ride that comes to a shocking conclusion.

So Godfather sucks, right?

Well, no. Godfather is a decent movie. It’s not special enough that I would mention it here except that this is one of those that has a reputation which requires any film buff to see it. But it is a decent movie.

The key to enjoying Godfather is knowing what to look for. When you look at the film from the outside, it seems to be the story of the fall of Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) mixed in with his replacement by his son Michael (Al Pacino) and how the family handles that. But that’s not a good way to see this film. If you try to understand the film in that way, it lacks focus and much of it feels like fake drama.

The way to enjoy this film is to understand that it is the ironic story of Michael. Michael is presented initially as a sensitive soul who disdains the murderous ways of his family and seems like he would be the savior of his family if only he were in charge. Unlike Vito, who seems tradition bound in a modern world, Michael is modern and practical. Unlike his hothead brother Sonny (James Caan), Michael comes across as a man who would never drag the family into pointless vendettas and can rationally solve any crisis. The only knock on Michael is that no one is sure he has the strength to issue ugly orders that may need to be issued because he is such a sensitive soul.

But events slowly thrust Michael into the role of head of family. Vito is nearly killed for refusing to embrace the modern world. Sonny is killed because he’s a hothead who doesn’t even know when to lay low. What’s more, the family finds itself betrayed by those who hide behind the family’s tradition of loyalty.

Finally, we get Michael. He’ll save the day, right?

Well, when Michael takes over, he brings an analytical approach that at first rubs the others wrong. It seems like Michael will now get the chance to modernize the family and end the vendettas. He will run the family with logic and dispassion. Only, this doesn’t seem to work. His logic comes across as weakness and it seems like Michael fails to recognize that the other mobsters are truly despicable people who will forsake their own good for the things that Michael has rejected.

But logic is not static. And once Michael understand this, his dispassionate logic tells him to kill everything that stands in his way, without mercy or remorse. In so doing, he splits the family and becomes the brutal tyrant who has ruined his life by becoming everything he hates. We know he can never be happy again, nor can anyone else in the family. We also know that his actions will eventually destroy the family.

If you understand the movie in this manner and watch for it, then the plot will move much more smoothly and the things that seem random or like filler in the lives of Vito and Sonny suddenly take on meaning. And ultimately, this becomes a rather interesting character study. It’s still nowhere near as good as Goodfellas, but it is a decent movie that is worth seeing.

Thoughts?

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Film Friday: Ocean’s Thirteen (2007)

I should hate this film on so... many... levels. Half the actors are jerks. The writing is nonsense. The whole film is nothing but a product placement. Wow. I should be railing against this sucker. Yet, I really enjoy this film. This is one of those rare films where style trumps everything else. This isn’t a film, it’s an experience, and if you’re using your brain, then you’re doing it wrong.

Plot

Willy Bank (Al Pacino) is an evil man. He dominates the Vegas casino industry and he just cheated his partner, Reuben, who just happens to be good friends with Danny Ocean (George Clooney). This was wrong. See, Bank shook Sinatra’s hand, as did Reuben, and that means Bank broke the code by cheating Reuben. So Danny and his crew set out to bankrupt Bank’s new casino to set things right. From there, the film becomes a Rube Goldberg heist plan in which Ocean and the boys need to break Bank’s security, rig the games to cheat in favor of the guests at a specific time, and then get all the guests out of the casino before they lose the money back.

Why This Film Works

To understand why this film works, let me explain why the original Ocean’s 11 worked... not the Soderbergh remake, but the original 1960’s film staring Frank Sinatra. Ocean’s 11 worked because of a form of nostalgia. Ocean’s 11 is like an invite to spend time with the hippest cats America has ever produced... the Rat Pack. When you watch Ocean’s 11, you aren’t watching to see if they pull off the heist, nor are you watching for plot or to see the acting. No. You are watching to get a glimpse of Frank Sinatra playing around with Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. You are watching to get a sense of what it was like to go to Vegas in 1960 and sit in the audience as all these guys showed up and clowned around for a couple hours right in front of you... these singers and comedians who advised presidents and ran with the mob, married the most eligible women of the era, stormed Hollywood on their own terms, and dominated the music world. These guys represent an entire era in American culture.

What does this have to do with Ocean’s Thirteen? Well, Ocean’s Thirteen is the second sequel to Ocean’s Eleven, which is a sort of remake of Ocean’s 11. Only, whereas Ocean’s Eleven really was never more than just a heist film that borrowed characters from Ocean’s 11, Ocean’s Thirteen captures the spirit of Ocean’s 11.

Like Ocean’s 11, Ocean’s Thirteen is entirely about the experience, not the story. It is about accessing a world you will never access on your own, no matter what you achieve in life. It is a world of casino whales and high rollers at a fantasy casino that is so ornate and stylized that it is the very essence of the image we have of “the casino experience,” an image that wasn’t true in the 1960’s when it was created and certainly isn’t true today. Indeed, nowhere in this film will you see slovenly tourists in Bermuda shorts placing one dollar bets in this casino. There are no rooms the size of closets and no employees who don’t speak English. The hotel staff here look like models or Hollywood butlers, not fat, lazy SEUI members. The guests are models dressed to the nines. The rooms are like mansions decorated by the best designers. Everywhere you look there are designer brands, premium alcohol, luxury cars, beautiful people.

Within this world you find yourself among a huge group of friends: Danny and Rusty and Linus and Reuben and Terry and the rest. And these aren’t like any friends you know. No, these people are all highly educated, clever, funny, beautiful, athletic... celebrities. They have amazing skills you can only dream of – gymnastics, computer hacking, super scheming, card sharping, etc. They are classy too, and they live by a code... a code of infinite loyalty, the kind of loyalty that makes you spend every penny of your millions of dollars to set right an insult made against one member of your crew. Even beyond that, they have amazing chemistry. In fact, they finish each other’s thoughts all the time and any one of them can completely screw up the entire plan without a hint of reproach from the others, because loyalty comes first and they never give up and never lose hope.

They have a good time too. In fact, despite the film being about a heist, it really isn’t. To the contrary, this film is about a chess match played against the ultimate fantasy casino for amazing stakes with no prospect that you will lose and played in a consequence free environment.

To put it simply, this is a fantasy world as much as if it had dragons... it is the American consumer vision of Heaven, and it lets you in completely. That’s why this film is so great. It offers you more and better friends than you’ve ever had, a playground you can never experience, and a game you can never really play in real life. It’s a hell of a ride.

What’s interesting to me is how the film builds this, because there are some fascinating little tricks that other writers should examine closely. First, to create the environment, the director essentially made a study of what works in the luxury advertisement world, and then he brought it to life. If you drive a Rolls, then hot chicks will get out of the car with you. If you drink Gray Goose, you will be rich and respected. If you wear the right clothes, you will be hip. This film takes all of American high-end consumerism and distills it to the images that appeal to us and injects them directly into your brain.

The friendships are interesting too because of how they’re built. First, no one has friends like this. Name one friend of yours who would throw away ten million dollars, everything they own, just to avenge an insult made to another of your friends. Moreover, no one has this many close friends. In fact, management studies have found that humans aren’t capable of monitoring more than about eight relationships with any level of attention, which is why companies don’t put people directly in charge of hundreds of people. Yet, here you are literally surrounded by dozens of loyal-to-the-death friends who are closer to you than any real life friend... these are people you’ve adventured with.

Even more interestingly, to give you the feeling that they are in fact close friends, the writer uses a dialog trick to make you believe there’s a long-time relationship there. Specifically, the writer has the characters speak “in their own language,” by having them reference things you don’t know, and has them constantly finishing each other’s sentences and thoughts, as people who are long-time friends often do. Just as interestingly, the writer starts each scene with one character telling the end of a story involving people the two characters know. Not enough information is given to tell you the story, but enough information is given for you to guess what they are talking about. For example, a character might say, “So I jumped out the window as her husband chased me,” which is enough to let you understand what happened even if you don’t know any of the actual details. What this does is it gives you the feeling that you are in on their relationship because you can understand what they are talking about even as you think other people couldn’t understand because it’s an insider story. In effect, they trick you into thinking that you share their special language, which makes you part of the relationship. This is actually pretty brilliant writing.

Finally, the film rushes all of this past you in a bombarding montage of sound, colors and stylized images, sometimes even being shown in split-screen images. Essentially, the film runs at such a quick pace that you never get a chance to focus on anything you are watching. Adding to this intentional confusion, the film shows a good deal in quick flashbacks, which keep you disoriented, and it often requires you to keep track of the dialog between cuts, as the last line in one scene becomes the first line in the next scene. The result is a film that keeps you from focusing on the plot itself and makes you just “live in the moment.”

Ultimately, this film works not because it’s a good film, but because it immerses you into an idealized, stylized world of intense friendship and camaraderie, unimagined wealth, and an impossibly-high party atmosphere, all wrapped up in a thick sense of adventure. That’s why this film works and that’s why the original Ocean’s 11 worked: because it sells you a trip into a fantasy world with friends you could never have in real life. And for a brief moment, you can be buddies with the coolest people on earth.

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