the godfather coda the death of michael corleone

The godfather coda the death of michael corleone movie#

The one impactful change is the new opening scene. How is “Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone”? (God, I just love saying that title.) Here’s the news and the ever-so-slight scandal: It’s the same damn movie. What happened is that she showed up and gave a technically unpolished, emotionally alive performance, and for that crime she was bashed like a Kardashian on Twitter. It always struck me that what was being attacked, at the time, was the nepotism of the casting: the fact that Coppola was born to Hollywood royalty and had landed in this movie. The dangerous romantic spark between Mary and Andy Garcia’s hotheaded Vincent is one of the most potent things in the movie, and the flow of feeling between Sofia Coppola and Pacino felt deep and true.

The godfather coda the death of michael corleone movie#

The movie was saying that this - a girl who was clearly a product of the media age - is what a mobster’s daughter might look like. It was obvious that she wasn’t a trained actress, yet her ripe sensuality and slightly dazed ordinary-girl inflections had a vividness that came across as authentic. One of the criticisms at the time I passionately disagreed with was the collective attack on Sofia Coppola’s performance. It’s a movie that can sweep you up if you let it. That said, “The Godfather Part III” gathers force as it goes along. Yet the fact that he walks around looking like the Godfather of Beverly Hills is a trivial but revealing indication that Coppola had misplaced his former mastery of detail.

In “Godfather III,” we have to buy that Michael, in the years leading up to 1979, has undergone a change - that in his cold dark staring way he has softened and is looking for redemption. But Michael Corleone? At the age of 50, he would never have abandoned his old-school Italian coif, the hair oiled straight back (just like his father’s), which gave him the look of a mobster cobra. I can certainly imagine that Al Pacino, in the early ’90s, might have shown up on the red carpet sporting a thatchy salt-and-pepper bristle cut. I’m talking about Michael Corleone’s hair. And why would Michael, now bent on respectability, object to his son becoming an opera singer?) What’s more, there’s a detail in the movie that’s so wrong it jars me in almost every scene. (Joe Mantegna’s Joey Zasa first seems a minor-league mobster, then he’s a showboating celebrity kingpin.

The storytelling, at times, is slipshod and arbitrary. Thirty years after its release, the flaws of “The Godfather Part III” are just as pronounced. I think that’s a tad overstated, but I stand by it. Yet by the end, the movie has attained a deep-grained emotional grandeur that can hold its own with that of the other two films.” What’s more, its narrative seams sometimes show.

This one is slower, talkier, and more prosaic: two hours of exposition and 40 minutes of payoff. Writing in Entertainment Weekly, I said, “‘The Godfather Part III’ isn’t the overpoweringly great movie the first ‘Godfather’ was (let’s be reasonable - how could it have been?), and it lacks the bone-chilling gradations of darkness that made ‘The Godfather Part II’ a singular American tragedy. In 1990, I was one of the few American critics who liked it. The reason I’d gone back to “Godfather III” is that it’s a movie I’d always wanted to revisit and never had. (It opens in a handful of theaters today and will be available On Demand and Blu-ray starting Dec. It makes the movie sound like a different animal than it was before. Kurtz” doesn’t have the same ring.) Nevertheless, the cumbersome title of “The Godfather, Coda” does provoke one’s curiosity. (“Apocalypse, Now and Then: The Cracking Up of Col. At the time, it wasn’t known that Francis Ford Coppola was preparing a new version of the movie, one that would be retitled “Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone.” It’s probably a good thing that Coppola hasn’t decided to retitle any of his other films. This past summer, I happened to watch “ The Godfather Part III” again.