The Godfather Review

Official trailer

The Godfather is the best film ever made from a craft perspective. Not the most entertaining, not the most beloved, not the most influential, though it’s all three.

The best constructed. The most complete. The film where every element of cinematic storytelling works at its highest possible level at the same time, and none of them compete with each other.

It gets a 10+++ because the standard rating scale doesn’t have a ceiling adequate to what Coppola achieved in 1972. Every other film on this review series gets measured against some version of what good looks like. The Godfather is part of what good looks like.

If I could keep only one film, I think it’d be this one. When Brando settles into that chair or Pacino’s face goes still, I feel the whole movie tighten around me, and nearly three hours go by like ninety minutes. My only complaint about The Godfather is that it makes almost everything else in the genre look unfinished.

What Brando Did That Nobody Else Could

Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone is the most complete performance in the history of American cinema. That’s a large claim and it’s the right one.

What Brando understood that most actors don’t is that Vito’s power comes entirely from what he withholds.

He speaks quietly, moves deliberately, occupies space without filling it with noise. The famous rasp isn’t an affectation, it’s the vocal expression of a man who has learned that people lean in to hear someone who doesn’t raise his voice, and that the leaning in is itself a form of submission. Every pause Brando takes is vital. The silence before he speaks is where the authority comes from.

The opening scene establishes this completely. Bonasera comes to ask a favor. Vito listens. He doesn’t react, doesn’t interrupt, doesn’t signal approval or disapproval. He simply receives. The audience leans forward exactly the way Bonasera does, because Brando has created a gravitational field out of stillness. By the time Vito speaks, “You don’t ask with respect. You don’t offer friendship.”, the words land with the weight of everything withheld before them.

This is acting as writing. Every choice Brando makes communicates character without announcing it. The way he holds the cat in that opening scene: not menacing, not theatrical, simply comfortable, a man at home in his own power. The way he plays the garden scene near the end, talking to his grandson among the tomato plants, the old man finally at rest in the only place that was ever really his. No dialogue could have written those moments. Brando found them inside the character and put them on screen.

The cat is my favorite detail in the whole film. A man with that much power spends the opening scene absently stroking a pet while Bonasera pleads with him, and I think that one choice tells you more about Vito than an hour of backstory ever could.

Brando’s Vito is a masterclass in the power of restraint. Authority that announces itself is performance. Authority that simply exists is the real thing. The camera, and the audience, can’t look away from the real thing.

The Transformation of Michael

Michael Corleone’s arc across The Godfather is the most carefully engineered character transformation in American film, and it’s the part of the picture I find hardest to shake. It works because Coppola and Puzo understood that a change from idealist to monster can’t happen suddenly. It has to be assembled from a sequence of decisions, each one comprehensible in isolation, each one closing a door that will never open again.

Michael enters the film as the family’s clean one. The war hero. The one who went to Dartmouth and got out. He’s seated apart from the family at the wedding, literally and symbolically.

When Kay asks about his family, he says “that’s my family, Kay. It’s not me.” He means it at that moment. The tragedy of the film is that it becomes a lie in his own mouth without him ever making a single decision to become a liar.

The sequence that turns the film is Michael’s offer to kill Sollozzo and McCluskey. It’s presented, and Michael presents it, as a tactical solution, with the moral crossing left unspoken. He’s the only one they won’t suspect. He’s doing it for his father. He’s doing it to end the war. Every argument is rational. None of them acknowledge what the act will cost, because Michael at that point doesn’t know yet. The audience doesn’t fully know either. Coppola lets the decision sit inside its own logic without underlining what it means.

By the film’s end Michael is ordering the killing of his brother-in-law while standing godfather to his nephew, holding two identities at once with a face that’s gone completely still.

The door closes on Kay’s face. He’s become his father, not the warm private version of his father, but the cold public one. The one who made Bonasera wait in the dark before receiving him. The transformation is total and it happened in increments so small that each one seemed survivable.

The Baptism Sequence

The baptism sequence that closes The Godfather is the greatest single sequence in American cinema. Six minutes of crosscut editing that synthesizes everything the film has been building and delivers it as a single devastating statement.

Michael stands in a church, renouncing Satan and all his works, speaking the words of a godfather making promises before God on behalf of his nephew. At the same time, his men are carrying out his orders across the city: Barzini shot on the courthouse steps, Moe Greene shot through the eye, Cuneo caught in a revolving door, Tattaglia killed in bed. Nothing in American film affects me more than the cut between those vows and those killings.

It’s Coppola making the argument the entire film has been constructing, in the most direct cinematic language available: Michael has become what he renounced. The baptismal vows are a lie in the moment he speaks them. He knows it. The audience knows it. The film doesn’t flinch.

What makes the sequence devastating instead of merely clever is Pacino’s face.

He’s not performing guilt or conflict. He’s performing the absence of both, a man who has made his peace with what he is, who speaks the holy words with complete composure because the words are now simply sounds. The stillness is the horror. The horror is complete.

Nino Rota’s score underneath the sequence is doing equally precise work.

The baptismal chanting and the violence share the same musical space without irony or emphasis. The music doesn’t tell you how to feel. It holds the two realities together and lets the juxtaposition speak. That restraint, at the moment of maximum emotional intensity, is the mark of filmmakers who trust their material completely.

Pacing as a Moral Argument

At nearly three hours, The Godfather never feels long. It’s the result of Coppola and editor William Reynolds making pacing decisions that are themselves moral arguments about the world the film inhabits.

The film moves at the speed of consequence. Coppola holds scenes until they’ve delivered their full weight. He allows conversations to breathe, to contain silence, to let characters think before they speak.

He built the famous horse’s head scene entirely on this principle: the setup is leisurely, almost mundane, and the reveal hits with force because Coppola didn’t rush to it. The Godfather trusts that an audience willing to stay with a scene will feel more than an audience being pushed through one.

The horse’s head is the scene I’d point to for anybody who thinks slow means dull. Coppola lets the setup sit there, mundane and unhurried, and I think the payoff is so ugly because he made me relax first.

This pacing also communicates something about the Corleone world.

The Corleones make decisions carefully, exercise power with deliberation, and rush nothing important. The pacing is characterization. A film about the Corleones that moved at the speed of a thriller would be lying about what kind of people they are. The deliberate rhythm is the truth of the world it depicts.

Silence is deployed as a precision instrument throughout. The space between Vito’s words. The quiet of the Corleone compound at night. Michael’s face after the restaurant scene, in the car, before he speaks to anyone. These silences are the film, doing its deepest work in the spaces where dialogue stops.

What Part II Gets Right and Gets Wrong

Part II contains some of the finest filmmaking in the trilogy.

The young Vito storyline, De Niro tracing the immigrant’s path from Ellis Island to the streets of Little Italy to the beginnings of the Corleone empire, is extraordinary. De Niro understood the assignment: he’s not playing Brando’s Vito, he’s playing the man who becomes Brando’s Vito. The physical choices are different, the vocal tone is different, but the interior logic is continuous. You believe these are the same person at different points in a life.

The problem is the Michael storyline. Where Part I gave Michael a clear, carefully engineered arc from innocent to monster, Part II gives him a sprawling, confusing middle chapter that never quite coheres. The Senate hearings, the Cuba storyline, the Fredo situation, the Roth conflict: these threads are individually interesting and collectively unfocused. The film wants to show Michael at the height of his power and the beginning of its cost, but the structure doesn’t make the argument cleanly. It accumulates instead of builds.

Part I worked because every scene was doing work that only that scene could do. Part II has scenes that feel like they could be moved or removed without changing the film’s argument. When you can rearrange a structure without breaking it, its parts weren’t essential. That’s a craft failure inside an otherwise serious film, and it’s why Part II sits significantly below the original despite containing real greatness in its Vito chapters.

Part III isn’t worth discussing at length. It exists. That’s the most generous thing to say about it.

Is The Godfather worth watching?

It gets its 10+++ because it’s the film that shows what cinema can do when every craft element works at its ceiling at the same time. Brando’s performance. Pacino’s transformation. Gordon Willis’s cinematography, the darkness that fills the frame, the faces emerging from shadow, the visual argument that this world works in the space where light doesn’t reach. Nino Rota’s score. The editing. The pacing. The writing. None of them are showing off. All of them are serving the same story with complete commitment.

It’s also the film that’s the most to teach writers, because its greatest achievements are structural. The baptism sequence only works because of what the film built across the previous two and a half hours. Michael’s transformation only devastates because Coppola showed you who he was before he became what he is. Vito’s authority only works because Brando spent the entire film withholding it carefully and releasing it precisely.

That’s why it gets a 10+++ from me, and I don’t lose any sleep over the plus signs breaking the scale. Everything in it is earned, from the cat in Vito’s lap to the door closing on Kay, and I can’t name another film where I’d struggle this hard to find a single scene worth cutting.

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