"The Godfather": Decline of a Family
Notes on The Godfather's 50th Anniversary
NOTE: The migration begins with these old pieces, given the 50th anniversary of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather this week. What follows is the first of many pieces originally written in 2009, exploring themes in the films and how they’ve resonated culturally.
The Buddenbrook family has been name-dropped in recent years by Francis Ford Coppola, relating to a “live cinema” project with the title Distant Vision, the filmmaker’s purportedly 500-page screenplay chronicling three generations of an Italian American family of artists in the 20th century, their story being concomitant with the invention of a whole new means of seeing: television. Being momentarily excursive from the subject at hand, this is the focus of Coppola’s 2017 book Live Cinema and its Techniques, in which he discusses work-shopping sequences from his script at college campuses, live cinema (something wholly distinct from “live television”) being an experiment he has been trying to realize since 1982's ill-fated One from the Heart (the idea in large part nixed by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro). Soon to be 83 and currently laboring to complete his other long-gestating dream project Megalopolis, it’s unlikely that Distant Vision will ever be realized beyond those workshops. Distant Vision is modeled on Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1900), an inspiration representing a compelling agon given Coppola’s optimistic disposition toward art and artists, whereas for Mann the artist signals a certain decline or decadence.
The Buddenbrooks have their more established Coppola cousins elsewhere with the Corleone family, the subject here, though for popular culture Mann’s subtitle “Decline of a Family” hasn’t necessarily took hold when applied to The Godfather. Despite its legacy, the tragedy at the center of The Godfather eludes its broader cultural interpretation, pity and terror not penetrating viewers enthralled by Mario Puzo's epic, which, since the first film’s 1972 release, has been digested by pop culture as catch-phrases and pastiche. The Mannian contemplations—whether regarding solitary individuals (or entire nations) floating through time—are muted by sensational violence. The story of a family decaying in the shadow of its elders—intrahistorical changes in cultural ideals—eclipsed by theatrical spectacle and regressive wish fulfillment. The story of Vito (Marlon Brando in Part I and Robert De Niro as a younger version in Part II) and Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) is one of survival, prosperity, decadence, and annihilation. Yet these films are adored by many people (and respected, even imitated, by many who haven’t seen them) who may interpret them as fairy tales of strength and achievement. We project our personal fantasies of success onto the Corleone family. This tension, however, is an apposite expression for a Great American Myth, as we’re caught between aspiration and tragic appraisal. Thinking of this immigrant story’s own poetic antecedents, it’s perhaps fitting that a reader feels a similar incoherence in The Aeneid, wherein Caesar Augustus’ fulfillment of Roman history is slyly undercut by Virgil’s equivocations, as if the poet sensed the buds planted for an empire’s downfall in its zenith, around 20 B.C.E.
It’s the violence implicit in a Mafia saga that gives the Corleone story a dimension absent from the Buddenbrooks, especially if viewers become receptive to the often neglected, however artistically rich, Part III, now rechristened by Coppola in a 2020 edit as The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone. Audiences loved the Corleones because they were invincible. Michael Corleone inherits his father’s almost supernatural resistance to death, something that proves to be ironically tragic at Coda’s conclusion. No matter how many forces align against them—rival mobsters, corrupt public officials, stool pigeons, double-crossing business partners, and even the Roman Catholic Church—the Corleones prevail, satisfied with the humiliation and death of their adversaries. Superficially, The Godfather and The Godfather Part II comprise a fantasy: the enemies putting one’s family in peril are justly punished in grotesque and gruesome ways. The Corleones again tie up loose ends in Coda, but Michael, in such a way that parallels how New Testament believers must interpret characters in the Old Testament (e.g. the many stages of King David), is a different character. No longer Godfather II’s creature of reptilian calculation, he is diseased and tired, laden by guilt and depression, attempting to be a legitimate statesman and businessman. Though the flaws in Coda warrant criticism, its cultural dismissal traces back to a question of why we love the first two parts. The Corleone’s fail because they succeed; they prosper at the cost of ideals. Coda wears ecclesiastical colors along with its shadows and autumnal light; Don Vito or the younger Michael would never pray in front of a corpse, or confess their sins to a priest. America has a history of eluding self-appraisal. This is also the tragic credo of the Corleone patriarchs.
However much The Godfather is an indictment of capitalism and aggression, it has been embraced by enthusiasts of Ayn Rand, military hawks, and ruthless dictators. In Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail, the rich business owner played by Tom Hanks refers to The Godfather as the I Ching, citing its sententious phrases as codes to live by. In 2008 The Godfather Doctrine, a foreign policy model for handling the escalating conflict with Iran, was published: Santino represents the neo-conservative with an openly militaristic approach, whereas Tom Hagen is liberal diplomacy. The book indicates we need a pragmatic blend of soft and hard power, the Michael Corleone method: “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” (Thinking of our own time in the shadow of Trump with Putin-lapping internet trolls feeding the frenzied disenchantment and uninhibited fanaticism of opposed political factions, one may lament 2022’s sociopolitical Godfather analogue is—if not Joe Mantegna’s pompous and dapper Joey Zasa—the nut played by Gregory Corso in Part III/Coda, protesting Michael’s business ambitions at a big meeting. “He’s got the map of SICILY on his face, can’t you see that??” Indeed, Michael wants to bridge Europe and America for a paradigm-changing business venture, and so perhaps to such windbags he’s an avatar of a satanic “Globalist” conspiracy of sorts. Anyway, that’s a whole other discussion and I digress :D).
Part I is a tale of survival and revenge, as the family stakes a claim to prosper in the future. The audience is certainly more forgiving of Michael Corleone than his sister Connie (Talia Shire), after he has her abusive husband, Carlo Rizzi (Gianni Russo), executed because Carlo conspired with rival mafia heads to fatally ambush Santino “Sonny” Corleone (James Caan). Even though the distinction of What’s Business and What’s Personal is false, Michael’s shrewdness is practical and reasoned. In Part II, Puzo and Coppola turn inward, asking us to confront ourselves in relation to the deep past and how it reverberates in the present. When we see the bloodlines develop, as we do in the dual father/son storyline in Part II, the world gets greyer. Michael not only orders the death of his brother Fredo (John Cazale), but he also, as his confession in Coda makes clear, “kills his mother and father’s son.” The hidden strands of murder veiled by reason are exposed. The truth should be unbearable, and it’s just that Michael’s diabetic affliction gives him eye trouble.
In agreeing to direct Puzo’s novel, Coppola didn’t think of the material as a “crime story,” but as the story of a great king with three sons, each with their unique characteristics. The family story would act as a metaphor for American capitalism, capturing the spirit of the production's period, the politically tumultuous and morally foggy days of the Nixon Administration. The mafia den’s machinations are dramatized like the courts in Elizabethan drama more than East Coast wise guys. While he’s too tightly wound to be a fresh figuration of the revelrous Prince Hal, Michael’s destiny has a precursor in Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays, where the rebellious prince embraces his ailing father, refashioning and purifying himself from his wild ways. “I’m with you now, pop,” Michael says to his father at the hospital, swearing his loyalty in a bedside moment that vaguely recalls Henry IV II IV.5. Other tragic forebears move through him, as an increasingly isolated ruler who must wipe everyone out, or “just my enemies” as he tells his adopted brother and chief advisor Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall). In Coda, he’s a tormented patriarch and suffers a diabetic stroke, thunder rumbling as long-buried confessions are verbally released as his body seizes. At the conclusion, Michael a twisted evocation of Lear, holding tight the lifeless daughter who died because of his sins, sinking into unconsciousness on the steps outside a Sicilian opera house on Easter Sunday. Over the course of nearly a century, an immigrant’s westward flight into the future becomes an odyssey leading back home (that faint echo of The Aeneid, the Trojan refugees coming back to Italy). The Corleone family has gained everything and yet hasn’t advanced.
The Corleone story recalls other literary families from Dickens and Trollope, but Buddenbrooks casts the most striking resemblance. Mann’s novel spans from the 1830s to the 1870s, its focus being a wealthy German mercantile family grasping the summit of social power and then gradually evaporating as a stable unit, its last offspring being a sickly, musically inclined representative of the third generation, Hanno. The background canvas features the development of the European Union, where smaller principalities and more independent centers of power dissipate with the interweaving of states and corporations, symptomatic of evolving technologies, most importantly the railroad. Social unrest, such as the revolutions of the 1840s, further adds to the breakup of bourgeois values until finally there is no longer a family (or the family business) but, in the 1870s, a solidly engineered German political state. Through its ironically detached narrator, Buddenbrooks discerns the loss of strong cultural strands that hold the traditional family unit together, as “strength for the family” becomes confused with strength for the family business, and then the larger nation state or social movements (“Socialism is at the gates!”)
Like Coppola’s survey of the Corleones, Mann’s Buddenbrook family is a kingdom at war with other families, obsessively trying to position a good heir for the throne. Modernity clashes with culture, and old values exhaust themselves in the new air. Like the Corleones, the Buddenbrooks are surrounded by the empty vessels of cultural meaning. Their house is across the street from a great cathedral, St. Mary’s, and much attention is paid to the various baptisms, weddings, and funerals occurring there. The novel opens and closes with the sentiments of religion: we first see young eight-year-old Antonie Buddenbrook (who has many similarities with Connie Corleone, not least of which is that she is the sole survivor of her generation at the book’s conclusion) practicing the catechism, while her grandfather (skeptical of religion) playfully teases her. The practice of this recitation indicates that the symbolic marvels that hang about this world mean no more than the arabesque decorations or fine linens on the windows: it is an exercised formality, the ultimate meaning of a prayer, like the reality of death, not psychologically tangible. The way Coppola uses religious ritual and iconography to complement the actions of the Corleones carries the same broad observation that Mann makes. As Cardinal Lamberto (Raf Vallone) tells Michael in Coda, “For centuries, men in Europe have been surrounded by Christianity. But Christ has not penetrated them.” Like a stone in a wet fountain, their souls are dry.
Nearly 800 pages and a half-century after Antonie Buddenbrook’s catechism recitation, all the male heirs of the family have either died or are unable to lead (the surviving brother Christian Buddenbrook, the Fredo of Mann's story, is institutionalized and may be suffering from tertiary syphilis), and the women, middle-aged Antonie included, are left to contemplate the future and the family’s legacy. “Where have they all gone?” the women ask of the dead. “We shall see them no more…God strike me, but sometimes I doubt there is any justice, any goodness, I doubt it all. Life, you see, crushes things deep inside us, it shatters our faith. See them again—if only it were so.” This melancholy is confronted by Sesame Weichbrodt, a little hunchback, who proclaims, “It is so!” Long stuck in her peripheral role, Sesame—"tiny with certainty”—loudly announces God’s benevolent will must be triumphant, a haunting and somewhat absurd image with a hefty proclamation juxtaposed against the frail and deformed frame voicing it. Decline puts the Buddenbrook family in this unsettling contemplation of the Eternal. Michael’s hysterical cry and lonely death in Coda carries the same mixture of sublime tragedy laced with irony.
Mann and Coppola created masterworks relying on mirrors, rituals reflecting each other throughout decades. The deaths of Vito and Michael are to be compared and contrasted, much like the photography in the opening rituals of all three Godfather pictures. At Connie's wedding in Part I, aside from Michael's girlfriend Kay (Diane Keaton), only the immediate Corleones pose for the main picture. By Coda's party photograph 35 years later, most of the proper Corleones are dead, divorced, or illegitimate offspring. Alien parties who turn out to be malevolent, like Don Altobello (Eli Wallach) and Archbishop Gilday (Donal Donnelly), have invaded the composition. As Altobello himself says to Michael at one point with a theatrical affectation, “Treachery is everywhere.”
Prayers are there to save us from the emptiness of reality, but they are soon forgotten when we are in the present’s comfortable warmth. This is what leads Michael Corleone to pray and swear on the lives of his children that he “will sin no more”; it is what leads Michael’s gloomy Buddenbrook counterpart, Thomas, to begin reading a volume of Schopenhauer, elevating his spirit and inspiring him to change his life. In both instances, the gravity of practical reality crushes any transformative thought, like waking from a dream that’s soon forgotten as both feet fall on the bedside floor. Both men return to their lives of logical exchanges and public performance, existences that are “artificial, self-conscious, and forced” as Mann writes, “the slightest deed in the presence of others [becoming] a taxing and grueling part in a play.” In The Godfather Coda, Al Pacino’s aged visage has a peculiar mask-like quality like that of the regal Hidetora in Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985), another appropriation of Lear that was certainly in Coppola’s mind during the last Godfather film’s production, given his grief over his son Gio’s death in 1986 (a trauma we elsewhere see in 2011’s ‘Twixt, and the feature debut of Coppola’s wife Eleanor, 2017’s Paris Can Wait).
Coppola was fortunate to be able to return to his original Sicilian and New York locations for The Godfather Coda, made 16 years after Part II. When the Corleones return to a location, we do also. The sense of time passing, of life passing—our families and dreams and homes—is resonant in the families of both Mann and Coppola. The Third Generation of the Buddenbrooks and Corleones relate to an aesthetic rejection of reality. In The Godfather Part II, adolescent Anthony Corleone is not exactly a misfit, but he is somewhat maladjusted, and that his father wants another son signifies a disappointment and desire for retrial (or maybe Michael just wants to make three sons, further replicating his revered father). Anthony, we discover, has an artistic temperament, drawing pictures in Part II and aspiring to be an opera singer (played by Franc D’Ambrosio) in Coda, in opposition to a father’s wishes that his son have more financially practical goals and finish his law degree. In Buddenbrooks, Thomas’ only child (with wife Gerda who, like Kay Adams in The Godfather, comes from a different ethnicity and “strange” culture – a Creole from Amsterdam marrying into a homogeneously German family), little Hanno, is also maladjusted and strangely isolated. He is drawn to music. He is the family tree’s final bud, sprouting limply as Art, for Mann, represents decay and that which is opposed to “Life.” Though Michael differs from Thomas in being, with some reservation, supportive of his opera-singing son, it is at the opera's performance that the Corleones meet their conclusion: the Family’s alignment with Art syncs in their inexorable fall, given how the cultural world around them is reduced to a performance. The only other male heir we see, in addition to Sonny’s unruly and illegitimate Vincent Mancini (Andy Garcia), is Tom Hagen’s son Andrew (John Savage), a young priest with “the true faith.” The third Corleone generation is sterile, existing only as art (or, “movie characters” in a movie trilogy). As Michael says shortly before the chaos on the opera steps, “When they hear the name Corleone, they’re going to think of a voice.”
Coppola’s Tetro concludes with two artist brothers (Alden Ehrenreich, Vincent Gallo), both survivors of familial trauma, embracing on a crowded street. This late-period Coppola image is a reversal of Michael’s deathly kiss of Fredo in The Godfather Part II. Coppola’s personal life was on the threshold of ruin throughout the 1980s leading to The Godfather Part III, from infidelities during the production of Apocalypse Now to years of near-bankruptcy. The successes of Godfather III and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) salvaged his finances, further padded by a burgeoning winery and travel business. His remaining children Sofia and Roman made their mark with their own accomplishments (e.g. Sofia’s films like Lost in Translation and On the Rocks, Roman’s Mozart in the Jungle and myriad screenplays in collaboration with director Wes Anderson). For the Buddenbrooks and Corleones, art precipitates the end, but for Coppola, it’s proved redemptive and necessary. Coppola still follows his muse faithfully, selling a large part of his successful winery to self-finance the $120 million Megalopolis, which—assuming the director is still ambulatory—shoots this fall. In fiction, familial decline gives The Godfather its dimension and power as the story of a Family rising and falling under Eternity’s weight. The three-film saga is its own blood ritual with an iconography of fallen bodies. It is not murder or death that matters, but measuring how things change: a family of great abundance on a path that exhausts itself, with the last patriarch collapsing on the ground enfeebled, grappling with memories. Fashioned thus as ritual, a life represented as art is the means by which the Buddenbrooks and Corleones transcend decline—at least as long as people find value in reading Mann's book and watching Coppola's films.
Originally written in the summer of 2009, revised 2012, 2018, 2022.