“I wouldn’t know where to…it’s been 30 years. In the most audacious scene, the future John Paul I (Raf Vallone) offers Michael confession. The editing gains invisible rhythm, maybe finessed for Coda. It’s in Sicily that this instalment finds its soul not so much in the literally operatic climax - a typically, enjoyably bombastic version of previous murderous crescendos – as in cloistered, quiet scenes where Michael reaches for redemption. The film’s second, Sicilian half, as Michael, Kay and family attend Anthony’s opera opening, explores a parallel sense that the Corleones’ fate rests in the Old Country’s bloody soil, where violent vendettas infuse operas and street puppet-shows. “It goes back to the Borgias,” he rages, confronted by unwisely sneering European businessmen in gilded backrooms. Michael is baffled and thwarted by “legitimate” business. But, like those pulses of light, residual genius still preciously flares. Coppola was already in permanent decline himself. Familiar, staccato piano throbs soundtrack another kitchen war council, which ends with Michael hospitalised as his father was, his own power ebbing. The helicopter gunship massacre of the Mob’s gerontocracy no longer seems such a distractingly garish substitute for Sonny’s chilling tollbooth murder while Zasa’s hunting through packed Little Italy streets effectively riffs on Don Vito’s shooting. When he hints at threats to Michael’s position, in the back of a car which passes through alternating shadows and light, Coppola and returning DP Gordon Willis, always happiest in the darkness, craft an elegantly ominous scene (resonant kin to Brando’s “Coulda been a contender” cab-ride). But oh, the lost frisson and authentic charge of Duvall plotting by Pacino’s side.Įli Wallach’s Machiavellian Don Altobello is, though, a magnificently querulous old snake. Robert Duvall’s pay demands meanwhile decimated the old guard, requiring Tom Hagen’s off-screen death, his consigliere role taken by George Hamilton. The Godfather: The Next Generation are mostly a modish mess. Garcia improves as Michael schools away Vincent’s rushes of blood, transforming him from The Godfather’s James Caan to its icy Pacino (a wildly unlikely trajectory). Only cast when hot names including Winona Ryder – who would have better balanced Mary’s affair with Vincent – dropped out, Francis’s daughter is at least appropriately callow, a soft innocent who Michael will “burn in hell to keep…safe” neither good, nor the film’s fatal flaw. Bridget Fonda is insultingly wasted as a one-night stand for Vincent, and D’Ambrosio’s Anthony, defying Michael to become an opera singer, line-reads almost as limply as Sofia Coppola. The miracle of The Godfather’s casting isn’t repeated. Now ageing Michael sits in the same back-room shadows as his father, receiving suitors including the strutting mobster running the offloaded Corleone rackets, Joey Zasa (Joe Mantegna), his remarried ex-wife Kay (Diane Keaton), and Vincent (Andy Garcia, pictured above with Coppola), illegitimate son of Michael’s late brother Sonny, who proves his hothead inheritance by biting a chunk out of Zasa’s ear. This prologue thematically sharpens the party which follows, mirroring The Godfather’s wedding opening, and animated by Nino Rota’s darkly waltzing, Italianate theme. He yearns to scrub his family’s power clean, for the sake of heirs Mary (Sofia Coppola) and Anthony (Franc D’Ambrosio), but surely also to reverse the original films’ central drama, the calcification of his innocent young war hero’s soul. We begin with a vertiginous overhead shot of a corporate skyscraper and cathedral steeple, as Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) seals a deal with the Pope’s banking capo to legitimise the liquidated casino holdings savagely procured in Part II. The only substantial changes bookend The Godfather, Coda. Still, seen after 30 years, especially in the cinema, the best scenes rediscover the old crepuscular power. Much feels forced, as if crudely impersonating the earlier, richly authentic world. Now that he’s reframing this renamed, subtle yet radical re-edit of The Godfather Part III as “a summing up, almost an illumination of what the first two films mean”, its ignoble, desperately hot-housed origin should be remembered. Coppola the inveterate cinematic gambler, crippled by the dashing of his indie mogul dream with Zoetrope Studios, could no longer refuse Paramount’s sequel offer.
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