The American morality of a classic
On the 50th anniversary of Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather, it is worth reexamining the film’s haunting opening. A face emerges from shadow and speaks: “I believe in America.” The moment is even more haunting now, when our major institutions, corporations, and even mainstream Hollywood promote America-hating nonbelief — as in the destructive, nihilistic mythologies of Spotlight, 12 Years a Slave, Moonlight, The Shape of Water, Nomadland, The Power of the Dog, as well as the subversions of the 1619 Project.
Coppola did not predict this. The face he reveals is not that of a powdered-wig, Caucasian Founding Father to scorn, but that of a stubby, swarthy beggar who commands our empathy. This immediately broadens the definition of American character to include the ethnic multitudes (or “people of color” in today’s heinous lingo). The Godfather’s popularity is also due to the fact that it inspires global identification. But its vivid depiction of the Corleones, an American crime family, involves more than a simple critique of corporate America or the country’s social contradictions.
As Coppola revealed in the two subsequent, necessary sequels (now available in Paramount’s lustrous 4K HD box set), The Godfather’s story of ambition, success, and tragedy updates the epic history of mankind’s confused struggle toward secular happiness. Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) and his scion Michael (Al Pacino) attempt to escape the shadows of working-class servitude and national ignominy through ruthless competition, aggression, and moral betrayal. No doubt every country has its Corleones — as shown in Parts II and III, where the saga expands and reveals connections to Old World heritage. Pauline Kael described the truth of Coppola’s concept as “the seeds of destruction that the immigrants brought to the new land, with Sicilians, Wasps, and Jews separate socially but joined together in crime and political bribery.”
But by now, that post-Vietnam, post-civil-rights vision of America’s corruption reverberates differently. Watching The Godfather again while both America and Hollywood are on the brink reminds us not only of the moral compass that once guided Coppola (and that’s lost to today’s film industry) but also of the state of political chicanery around the globe.
It isn’t enough to simply go back to The Godfather, neurotically reliving the same romanticism and suffering. Coppola’s classic should inspire film-watchers to explore the movies that have been influenced by The Godfather, that continue its fidelity to the rigors of Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, even the Gospels. Its successors include Bellochio’s Vincere, Makhmalbaf’s The President, Benny Boom’s Next Day Air, Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies, Raymond DeFelitta’s Rob the Mob, Brian Taylor’s Mom and Dad, Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux, S. Craig Zahler’s Dragged across Concrete.
Of these films, give particular note to domestic stories that face up to Coppola’s complexities — the experiences in which the troubled American psyche rejects certain qualities and the demands of modern life and resists social-justice clichés. These post-Godfather films “reject ‘Americanism’ itself” as Robert Warshow put it in his 1948 essay “The Gangster as Tragic Hero.” They are in search of something recognizable, even frightening, in American life — not like the characters in Goodfellas or Casino, which were aberrations of the American dream, perversely enticing us to enjoy crime, treachery, and sadism. Scorsese betrayed the powerful ethnic realization of his semi-autobiographical Mean Streets, but Coppola returned to his version of it when Part III reclaimed the Church (Michael’s repentance) and Opera (Michael’s punishment).
It is the ethnic-religious contest in The Godfather (the contrapuntal baptism and gang war like the prayer and battlefield sequence Coppola devised in Patton) that makes it a rebuke to Scorsese’s late-career triteness. And that haunted anguished face of the opening scene’s Sicilian petitioner bases the story in a still-relevant sense of the American ideal.
In the essential struggle out of society’s crushing anonymity, the American dream can turn to nightmare. Coppola’s nostalgic gangster understands that better than today’s radicals who lack his sympathy. They decadently prefer films that put forth a narrow, race- and gender-based deterioration and emasculation of America’s self-image — which explains the enthusiasm for the America Last allegory of Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite (because nonbelief in America also extends to those who admire Bong’s fascination with South Korea’s secret fascist potential).
The Godfather set an artistic standard that is also a moral and political challenge. Movies that don’t meet that challenge are counterfeit — symptoms of cultural decay.