The upcoming Dune installment got me thinking about the burden of following two great films.
The upcoming Dune installment got me thinking about the burden of following two great films. Few know the hazard better than Francis Ford Coppola. Not even a 1991 Best Picture nomination spared The Godfather Part III from becoming a punch line, with his daughter as its all-too-convenient scapegoat. Sofia Coppola herself has wryly joked about being known as “the amateur actress who single-handedly ruined The Godfather.”
She wasn’t great. She also didn’t sink it.
Part III’s first problem was existential. The 1972 original was a self-contained masterpiece, and Part II brought Michael Corleone’s tragedy to its natural conclusion. Paramount nevertheless insisted on a sequel, overruling Coppola and Mario Puzo’s preference for an epilogue. That was the conceptual mistake. A sequel needs Michael to survive one more war and arrange the succession. An epilogue asks what becomes of a man who destroyed his family and now wants forgiveness. Part III tried both and didn’t quite pull off either.
After that failure, the biggest flaw sits at the top of the cast sheet. By 1990, Al Pacino was already operating in the larger register of his later career. His rasp and sudden shouts bear too little resemblance to the Michael we left sitting alone at Lake Tahoe some 20 years earlier. What’s frustrating is that Carlito’s Way proves Pacino still had the quieter gear. He simply miscalculated here.
Michael’s (d)evolution isn’t the only temporal dislocation in Part III. You would never know the first two Godfathers were Nixon-era productions. This one might as well have featured a Game Boy. Bridget Fonda, in her blown-out bob, looks like she wandered over from the McCallister Christmas party. There is also a distinctly ’90s self-awareness to the production. We can look past Joey Zasa resembling the Italian-American gangster caricature the earlier films helped popularize. Michael and Kay visiting iconic sites from the first film at least serves the story. But when Nino Rota’s music turns up inside the movie twice, you get the sense these characters know they’re in The Godfather.
After Sofia’s presence, the most common complaint is Robert Duvall’s absence. He is missed, but I think the picture survives it, with George Hamilton’s B. J. Harrison absorbing the consigliere business and Diane Keaton, in the film’s best performance, carrying the living memory of who Michael was. Andy Garcia was a fine addition, too. Making Vincent the result of Sonny’s tryst at Connie’s wedding is exactly the sort of dynastic echo a third Godfather ought to attempt.
The movie has better moments than its reputation allows. Michael’s confession to Cardinal Lamberto is among them: “I killed my mother’s son. I killed my father’s son.” His scenes with Kay have the devastating looks of two people who love each other yet know they cannot live together. The Cavalleria rusticana finale, crosscut with the family settling its business across Italy, belongs in the Coppola hall of fame. Then the picture commits a fatal mistake.
Coppola revisiting those final seconds in 2020 was one of that year’s few highlights. Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone resurrects the trilogy’s moral center by making the Byzantine Vatican intrigue serve Michael’s futile attempt to launder his sins. More important, it spares us the didacticism of watching him collapse in a courtyard. His real death was on the steps of a Sicilian opera house. The physical one was merely a formality.
The Coda has its own issues. Cutting Michael’s question at Don Tommasino’s coffin, “Why was I so feared, and you so loved?”, was unforgivable. Still, it is a substantial improvement, with nearly every Sofia Coppola scene intact. That ought to be enough to acquit her.
In time, Coda should be regarded as the trilogy’s true conclusion, with Part III demoted to something closer to the 1977 made-for-TV Saga than the final word on the Corleones. It still wouldn’t change my 1991 Oscar verdict. That slot belonged to Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan or Charles Burnett’s To Sleep with Anger. But Coda is a fine picture, with a lesson I hope Denis Villeneuve has learned: The third one doesn’t have to be bigger. It has to know why it exists.