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Rating: On the Naples seafront, I saw many young people wearing Narcos T-shirts, and along Via San Gregorio Armeno, various statuettes of Genny Savastano from the Gomorra series. It is the fate of certain works—particularly prone to misinterpretation—when they meet an audience unable to distinguish between heroes and non-heroes, especially when there are no clear distinctions, but a spectrum of grays. If films like Matteo Garrone's Gomorra or Francesco Munzi's Anime nere leave no doubt about the intimate misery of the criminals' condition, there are others that have made misinterpretation between heroism and crime their strength, precisely thanks to the audience's inability to understand.
The Godfather is a film loved for its depth in portraying a world and a family of criminals who nevertheless have values? Perhaps, in part. But for the general public, the deeds of Vito and Michael Corleone are purely epic, violence and intrigues like those of Goodfellas and many other films. The general public, I believe, has never grasped the subtle moral distinctions of Francis Ford Coppola in The Godfather - Part II. In an important film ranking, Michael Corleone appears as the eleventh-best villain of all time. This struck me quite a bit because including him among the villains seems indicative of many people's—critics included—inability to fully understand a complex film like the second in the saga. I watched it again after many years and would like to say a few things.
It is an aporia, a moral paradox that continues to propose its contradictory instances without a possible solution. There is no possible dialectic with a demonic sphinx like the gigantic Michael Corleone of Al Pacino. His gaze does not rest on the people around him; it looks into infinity, or into the void if you will; it's impossible to divert its trajectory concerning his goals. In being a criminal boss, Michael is, in a certain sense, pure in his intentions. And it is this paradox that animates the entire film, in both of its chronological sequences. There are values that underlie the criminal disvalue. But if for Vito these were simpler issues, children of another era, with Michael the world begins to complicate, and all the contradictions of a gentleman criminal emerge conspicuously. As long as it comes to protecting a neighborhood, things are simpler, but in front of equally formidable sphinxes like Hyman Roth, the Cuban revolution, judges, politics, the press, the confrontation begins to become uneven.
Coppola's language and direction emphasize this change of times. The scenes depicting Vito seem to have an almost farcical watermark because, all things considered, they are still small issues, albeit involving deaths. And indeed, even death is not horrific; it is shown with emphasis because it concerns happenings now part of history, like in a tale of mafia epic, it is not subject to moral judgment. And in those sequences, it is true that the criminal becomes a hero, by precise directorial will. Vito was massacred from when he was nine, brought to an alien reality, where he had to work with his head down, humbly, for a bowl of soup. Then at a certain point, he said enough, rebelled against life's abundant beatings, realized he had the temerity even more than Don Fanucci, and from that moment on he could not stop, but always with a benign demeanor, faithful to the intent of protecting his neighborhood. Of course, in his long life, he would have also committed many atrocities, but always according to a logic (perverse, but born of an insatiable hunger that even when satiated, remains unsatisfied) that has its insurmountable limits. Everything seems natural and almost inevitable in the godfather's parabola, as if he didn't really choose, but simply followed a basic logic and an ancient morality after the reckless and courageous act that decreed his rise above the other neighborhood cockroaches. But it's a cinematic deceit! Coppola crafts a hagiography that compared to the reality data can only be defined as at least reticent.
On the opposite front, Michael seems more like a demon. But is he so different from his father Vito? No, quite the opposite. He has values, he has limits he doesn't intend to surpass, yet his figure can't help but emerge as demonic, again by the director's precise will, who insists on him with long close-ups that highlight all the angles of his persona. The avid aggression in negotiations, the "ancient" harshness in family relations, the sacredness of respect to his name, the vindictive fury that doesn't look anyone in the face. Father and son are not so different; it's the complexity of reality that changes, the demands of wives, the discord among brothers, the cunning and opportunism of politicians and institutions. Vito had nothing and thus nothing to lose. He was a pure without fears. Michael has everything and everything to lose; he is a pure poisoned by fear, by the turmoil of needing to be strong, and by the terror of being less great compared to his famous father. The terror of not being able to bear the weight of the whole family leads him to destroy that same family.
The violence almost carnival-like in Vito's tale becomes icy and almost hidden in Michael's gray affairs. Surgical executions, suicides of Roman memory, not shown, suffocated by the anxieties of the instigator who lives the killings not as an act of carefree vitality of the strongest, but as a final subterfuge of the king who sees his entire kingdom crumbling around him. The deaths are problematic, discussed even before they happen; they are widely foreseen yet always contestable, unresolved, and debatable in their necessity. Vito's murders, on the other hand, are solar, sacred, almost joyous. This too is a cinematic distortion that aims to show a generational decay, but the discerning viewer must defuse it and not forget that they are still murders. Vito's are not less serious. The filmmaker inserts in his most successful mafia film the most feared nemesis for works of this kind: the temptation to fit these protagonists into canonical moral categories. In this way, he imposes further—and quite rewarding—effort to reach a perfect understanding of his work.
He places his Hamlet-like protagonist in a study full of dark furniture and sofas, alone, with the devil in his eyes. Then he places his father, the epic hero, in a happy, folkloristic, carefree New York. He makes him speak with a shrill voice, almost always in Sicilian dialect, surrounds him with children, shows him filling them with affection. By contrast, his son slams the door in the face of his children's mother. But it's a deceit, one that Coppola extends to his viewer. Vito is not good, Michael is not bad. They are both, in their way, cruel, evil, bloodthirsty, and in their way, good, loving, affectionate. The decay lies in the times, it's constitutive of things, blood, generations.
Beyond this aporia, there is a film that unlike the first has less desire to emphasize intrigues and twists, preferring the broader and slower spans of screenplay, building a narrative that focuses on the characters and their existential philosophies, rather than on great exciting and adrenaline-filled scenes. Almost a whispering work, a chamber drama with long dialogued scenes, unfolding with pacified simplicity, without the need to promise strong emotions, but amplifying the less spectacular textures and almost nullifying the more fascinating component of the criminal world. It is all a great sorrowful premise, made of sharp words, sanctioning the failure of the dialogue Michael tries to carry on with his friends "and especially the enemies". The boss genuinely seeks a moderate way, but the family's violent legacy boils in his veins and faced with every mediation failure, the only solution he sees is that of blood. Executions carried out almost with tact and sensitivity, out of sheer functional necessity or to maintain coherence with certain ancient values that cannot be forgotten. Michael is that linking ring between the extreme (and painful) rigor of the past and the crumbling of every moral stake that begins to infiltrate even the Corleone family. And his rigidity, instead of stopping the decay, does nothing but accelerate it, because applying Don Vito's values to a changed world, which demands flexibility, can only make things worse and scorched earth around the new, dark godfather.
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