Days 7 and 8: "The Godfather" and "The Godfather: Part II" - Where's the Soul, Mon Frere?

warning: rant ahead...two days' worth at least...

Films 7 and 8: "The Godfather" (1972) and "The Godfather: Part II" (1974)


I’m a girl who believes in “Never Say Never” – the saying, not the Bond movie. (Not that Sean Connery was terrible or anything, but let’s face it – sssssllllllooooowwww film.)

I believe in giving most everything a chance.

I tried understanding football after sitting through weekend after weekend next to my husband. Now I’m more extreme than many men in their NFL devotion, including a strict no-phone-calls-or-visitors policy on Game Day.

I sought clarity on the “younger women make me feel sexy so I’m giving my old wife the boot” POV, worried that I might be wrongly condemning the majority of La Jolla or Beverly Hills as soulless macho narcissists. This led to enjoying several pieces that tackled the subject – Steve Martin’s “Shopgirl,” for instance, and last year’s cancelled dramedy “Big Shots,” a rich man’s “Sex in the City” – and lo, I found I could identify – even if I didn’t always agree – with some of these resolute ‘old wife’-traders.

Shoot, I even checked out Clive Owen and Michael Davis as they out-Woo’d John Woo in the recent “Shoot ‘Em Up” – a non-stop, hysterical attempt to leave no shot (of film) without a shot (from a gun). I howled in fact at Paul Giamatti’s overdone bad guy with a one-track mind: kill, kill, grimace. (Okay, two tracks.)

But I will never, ever, ‘til the day I die understand what people – especially men, it seems – see in “The Godfather.” Yes, go ahead and scream. Yell. Call me a feminist, chick-flick-loving heretic. Doesn’t hurt. And it’s not going to convince me to love this insipid movie or its never-ending sequels.

It’s taken me thirty-seven years, but I’ve finally gotten around to watching – or making as good a stab as I can muster – these power-heavy polemics. I even watched “Godfather Part II” just to see if Diane Keaton's mealy-moused wife 'Kay' would ever wake up. (She does, apologizes for it and then disappears.) And for the benefit of my movie-watching sisters, I can safely say, “Skip it.” Unless you harbor a burning desire to see men posture for power; suppress, bully or ignore the women in their lives; and struggle with the ever-present dilemma of who to kill when – you can probably sleep peacefully without these movies.

No offense to Pacino, Coppola, De Niro and the rest, but they just don’t do it for me. Men dealt a bum rap. Poor, humiliated, desperate to escape the brutality of their childhoods. Hmmm…what to do? Something new? Groundbreaking? Anything that would earn my respect as a filmgoer, if not as a woman? Well…

Brando, as old Don Vito Corleone, tells his underlings, including son Michael (Pacino) to shoot people. Michael resists, but then his brother and wife are shot, so he shoots people, too. In the next film, as a silent child of five, Vito Corleone suffers through his father’s murder by the local Old World mafia, then his brother’s, and finally, right in front of him, his mother’s. He doesn’t say a word, just runs. He’s smuggled onto a boat for New York. He’s quarantined on Ellis Island, and finally, alone in his room overlooking the Statue of Liberty, he breaks into a perfect, transcendent hymn, worthy of the Sistine Chapel. In the next scene, instead of seeing him struggle to accept his new world, we view his miraculous replacement by a grown-up, talking Vito (De Niro), happily married but poor. Guess what he decides to do for a living? Bang bang. Wow me.

“But these are universally revered films!” you cry. Universal for men, maybe. When was the last time you noticed a woman weeping with you as Michael Corleone sacrifices his humanity for “family?” (i.e. organized crime) Pauline Kael loves them, you say. Whatever. One female critic who claims to love male-only domain genre films does not a ‘universal’ trend make. What’s your wife got to say about it?

Probably nothing, since she can’t even make it through any of these yawners. I’m not saying all women are faking it who claim to appreciate these flicks, but I draw the line at “objectively great.”

“You're oversimplifying!” you’ll likely hear. Especially if you’re in a Serious Crowd. And you can count on some females in the group to be towing the Officially Accepted View. “These are classic texts on the American experience!” they’ll cry. And you will balk and wonder what to say next.

Here’s my two cents. Hope it helps you out of the jam.

Michael Corleone’s central problem in “The Godfather:” what kind of man will he be? What can I say? Not my problem. “Oh, but it’s about family,” my pal James told me recently. “Everyone has family.”

Sure, I’ve got family. Will any of those family members ever pressure me to be the head of the mafia? Nope. Okay. Neither will James’s. But I bet he's closer.

Will my friends and family even judge me alone by the job I have? Any Western woman who can answer “yes” without reservation has some evolved parents – the kind that don’t want grandkids. But say they do. Say they don’t care at all whether I’ve found love, whether I’ve got someone “to take care of me” like a small puppy. Some say they love us anyway, even if we’ve failed at most mothers’ version of ‘being of a complete woman.’ Will they then turn their critical eye on me and ask me to forsake my own moral code in order to save the family honor? Sorry. I don’t think so.

Men are asked to turn a blind eye to morality sometimes – often even – on behalf of their worldly success, yes. Women sacrifice – and are often expected to sacrifice – that very worldly success to keep the ‘family’ fed, bathed and populated. Michael Corleone loses his soul in order to save his family’s honor and standing. His wife Kay (Diane Keaton) loses hers when she aborts their son in order to save him from following in his father’s footsteps. Michael strikes her, disallows her from seeing her children and excommunicates her from his life. (Okay, I’m skipping ahead to “Godfather II;” she’s too silent even to count in the first film.) Michael loses her, yes, but he was already a shell – no longer fully human. He will continue to be successful in the world. She has lost everything. There is no redemption for a woman without moral superiority.

But her plight is not what “The Godfather” is about. Nope, it’s simply: “What will Michael do with his life? Will he sacrifice power and stature (represented by his family) and break away for freedom (represented at first by Kay)?” A worthy question, but a man’s question. In the end, he believes vengeance for his brother’s death and the death of his first wife justifies his return to the family fold. The fight, even though he didn’t start it, must go on. And to complete his fall from the light, he drags down Kay with him. (And all my sister and I can think is, ‘Run, girl, run!’)

I do not say that women aren’t required to choose between right and wrong, between morality and success. (See Lady Macbeth.) What I do believe is that very few of us have been offered the inherited reins of corruption as a birthright. Millions of women have felt the impact of family violence – across their cheeks – from the same kind of men who in “The Godfather” espouse to “put family first.” But how many men have been willing – much less eager – to give their daughters that power? How many women have been shamed into killing – or abusing – others on behalf of the family pride? Maybe the one out of a thousand who honestly lists “The Godfather” as a favorite film.

Society asks women to die for our families, not kill. (Female soldiers returning from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan are finding that clinics often don’t even recognize their duty as having PTSD potential, since according to Congress, they weren’t officially in combat.) We died in childbirth in droves in a pre-hospital world. Post-hospital, we continued to die, years before our time – worked to the bone in 1930s America on remote farms with ten children and no electricity – and continue to die in our 50s in 21st century cities, as we often work two jobs, both underpaid, to put food in front of our ‘fatherless’ children. Most horrifically, we die because our ‘protective’ husbands and boyfriends would rather see us dead than with someone else (still the leading cause of female homicides).

But I would argue that we die most often in the movies so that our cinematic husbands can suffer nobly - without complications. When was the last time you saw a Clint Eastwood or Mel Gibson wife still alive by the 20-minute mark?

Which pill is harder to swallow? Life without morality or never-ending martyrdom? I don’t know many movies which take both sides of the real story head-on. There are thousands of films which explore a woman’s sacrifices, her moral quandaries when it comes to family. “Sophie’s Choice” is memorable because a mother must choose which child will die – but it’s a man who does the killing.

So that the men’s heads will stop reeling, I will say here that the “Godfather” movies have value. Any movie that moves you, that addresses dilemmas you face, that changes your world or resonates in your consciousness long after you’ve seen it – anything that does that has enormous value – to you.

But it’s time women cinephiles were honest with their male counterparts. Instead of nodding blithely when these films inevitably come up in conversation as The Greatest of All Time, I hope some of you will find the courage to say, “Really? Bored me senseless. But ‘Room with a View?!’ Now there’s a movie!”