Screen
Alleva, Richard
SCREEN LESS THAN EPIC 'GODFATHER III' t's depressing to watch a film about aridity that is itself arid. In The Godfather: Part I11, the aging Michael Corleone is withering. But so is the...
...Coppola's direction also lags in the scenes of conversation...
...Diane Keaton appears again as Kay and that's the problem...
...I'm not prepared to say she's an actress but I found her an endearing camera object...
...It's as if we were being told that only Michael's hands remain in the world...
...He simply jumps to the next scene showing the pair scrambling into a getaway car...
...It is a ghastly affair...
...Instead, he has the financial sharks murdered...
...Much of the bloodletting throughout the film is unconvincing...
...This opening sequence sets a tone of impotence, gloom, dangerous restlessness, and power unenjoyed that is quite appropriate for this stage of the Godfather saga...
...She simply appears...
...Godfather III feels like the first unit on a new assembly line...
...Joe Mantegna brings his usual magnetic sleaziness to Zasa, but he never finds the core of the role...
...As the two young hoods embrace at Michael's request, Zasa whispers an insult and Vinnie bites off half of Zasa's ear...
...The first two Godfather movies were epic...
...My parents' generation still remembers listening to the radio on the morning of December 7, 1941...
...He is a hothead who must learn caution and cunning...
...Super Bowl Sunday went on as planned--Americans "need a break," and to hell with Scuds in Tel Aviv...
...This one, through a combination of high tech and administrative manipulation of high brilliance and cynicism, seems almost to have broken the "Light Barrier," as if the information 134: Commonweal...
...As in the earlier films, the Don holds council in a nearby room as the party goes on...
...Two of the best young American actors are wasted: Bridget Fonda is vividly sexy as a reporter, a role which only exists to complicate a standoff between Garcia and two thugs...
...When Michael leans back in his armchair-throne, Willis makes all of Pacino disappear into shadow except his hands...
...RICHARDAL LEVA MEDIA NINTENDO FROM HELL THE GULF WAR ON THE TUBE hen I heard about the first air strikes against Baghdad, I was trying to leam how to play Dungeons and Dragons from some students of mine in the university pub (my character--try not to be surprised--is a chaotic neutral gnome thief...
...All the Godfather films begin with a family celebration...
...John Savage wanders on and offthe set dressed in a cassock as lawyer Tom Hagen's son...
...How do our heroes survive...
...But this war is altogether new...
...A B-movie director of the forties wouldn't have descended to such a shortcut...
...Many of the guests don't even recognize one another since several aren't relatives but businessmen-couriers of Michael's far-flung empire...
...But while Brando settled accounts with the amiable finality of a grand seigneur and the young Pacino of part two dealt with crooked senators with dispatch, the aging Michael must now, to his own distaste, try to end a seemingly petty feud between his hot-headed nephew, Vincent, and the odious Zasa...
...The latter belongs to Sofia Coppola...
...What they come up with is a story outline of sufficient solidity...
...This apparition works marvelously in the initial scenes to change our perception of Michael...
...Here is a monster who is tired of being a monster...
...The only times we have seen Vinnie in deadly action were when he struck without Michael's permission...
...Many of the camera angles don't elucidate the dialogue, and the cutting is often furtive...
...In him, exhaustion is engendering the yearning for redemption...
...His performance seems to issue from that comer of the actor's talent that produces striking cartoons like his Big Boy in Dick Tracy rather than the "human" work in Dog Day Afternoon or the other Godfather films...
...But the veneer turns out to be the whole performance...
...By the end of the movie, Michael has appointed Vinnie his successor...
...There's nowhere to hide, nothing to use as a shield, and on every side of Vinnie mafiosi are being perforated...
...Which brings us to the other actors...
...A friend rushed up, told us what was happening, and we all moved to the big TV screen next to the beer and pizza counter, abandoning our board game for what seems more and more, as day follows day, the Nintendo from Hell...
...A Borgia woman transported to the twentieth century, she radiates more darkling power than any of the gun-toting males in the cast...
...But so is the inspiration of his creators...
...There are too many gaps in the story...
...That war, in this more than any other century, is a media event, is of course a resounding clich6: since, in this century, information travels at a normal speed of 186,000 miles per second, it's difficult to say what is not a media event...
...Michael resorts to violence and once again I 22 February 1991:133 brings suffering and death to his immediate family...
...One longs for director Francis Ford Coppola and screenwriter Mario Puzo to come up with a story that can fulfill this great image...
...Quite possibly, and some of them may even be good, the way better episodes of a TV series are good: good enough only to keep us waiting for subsequent episodes, interesting fragments, not self-sustaining wholes...
...This Michael is a near-hunchback lightly coated with white dust...
...Gluey writing, muzzy direction, and a surprising number of ineffective performances render Godfather III an unfulfilled promise...
...But the hands still beckon, consign, condemn...
...And just as the gala wedding of part one presaged full-bodied melodrama, and the metallic gaiety of part two's Nevada blowout set the stage for cold-blooded maneuvering, this party registers the Corleone situation of 1979...
...We know that Michael, having already legitimized most of his empire, wants to acquire the church business legally and cleanse it of its current administrative corruption...
...I remember nightly coverage of the Tet offensive...
...Andy Garcia as Vinnie is effective in quiet moments but his explosions didn't shake me...
...And why complain of nepotism when Coppola's sister, Talia Shire, gives the film's best performance as Michael's sister...
...Michael's sister CoImie, now a hard-edged gangster-dowager, tries to pump some life into things by trotting out old-timers to sing Sicilian numbers, but a sneering thug, Joey Zasa, puts the damper on that with his braying mockery...
...The only reason seems to be to provide part three with the obligatory concluding blood bath...
...In a room ripped by machine gun fire, Vinnie guides his uncle to safety...
...So why doesn't Michael, who presumably has the low-down on every crook in the Western world, simply expose the fraudulence of his enemies...
...Eli Wallach as the conniving don is obviously the actor Coppola was relying on to provide the color that Lee Strasberg and others brought to the earlier films...
...Will there be more Godfathers...
...But in its emotional range, this is a narrow movie...
...Michael's power is outliving Michael...
...This is an expensive movie, a long movie...
...His voice lacks the color and edge he gave to David Mamet's dialogue in House of Games...
...Worse yet is the vagueness of Michael's conflict with the corporation crooks...
...His eyes resemble those of a whipped, pleading spaniel...
...Michael, attempting to climb out of his pit of despair by trying to wrest one of the church's corporations from the crooked financiers who have ruined it, is battled by the financiers and by another mafia don...
...Why...
...But he can't even do it...
...The personality is receding, the brain is exhausted, the diabetic body longs for death...
...If Pacino had managed to give this veneer of grotesque pathos a substratum of danger, his characterization might have brought the movie a sustaining charge...
...Finally, decisively, Pacino...
...Here, the financiers are simply products of the make-up and wardrobe departments: grey men in expensive suits...
...A pretty face plays Michael's son and a prettier one plays his daughter...
...But this scenario remains an outline that never gets filled in...
...Cinematographer Gordon Willis superbly contributes colors that recall the looks of the two predecessors, but now we seem to be looking at the familiar blacks and browns through a sickly wash...
...Beats me...
...His voice bleats...
...Their roles aren't adequately written and there are no opportunities for the actors...
...He has lost his sense of scene-toscene rhythm, too: one long, hushed, pause-filled scene between Corleone and a cardinal is followed by another plodding, hushed, pause-filled scene between Corleone and his sister...
...Very few of them score...
...In this picture, Michael's enemies are colorless...
...Apparently the problem beat Coppola as well...
...Having received an honorary title from the Catholic church in return for charitable contributions, Michael, hunched by guilt and exhaustion, attends a postinvestiture party...
...Perhaps the best ingredient of parts one and two was their juicy villainy...
...Vinnie is taken into the Don's retinue on a probationary basis...
...But Wallach's acting is excruciating: a collection of hand-me-down Italianate gestures from a hundred other gangster movies...
...Only in the opening scenes is this contraction meaningful...
...Where are the scenes that demonstrate that the young mafioso has acquired the cool calculation of a don...
Vol. 118 • February 1991 • No. 4
