The Godfather I/II

1.
The Godfather films (excluding the third) are unique as they are a commentary on love. A direct commentary, not anything obscure. Most crime dramas center around excitement, aggression or hatred, but these films focus on our expressions, feelings and actions motivated by love rather than desire. Love defined by Erich Fromm: an action centered on care, responsibility, respect and knowledge. "The principle underlying capitalistic society and the principle of love are incompatible." It's somber in that sense.

2.
Vito's introduction is a disconnect -- seated inside his office underlit listening to a demand for revenge as his daughter is outside surrounded by people celebrating her union to a sadist and traitor. The spectacle reminds of family, unity, tradition and, last, loving expectation. Vito's love is obvious. The wedding itself is a ceremonial representation of his paternal affections within his identityboundaries: her romantic affinities typical of the era, her husband's desire for authority (for exploitation, to use another Frommian designation) and Vito's need for familial affiirmation. The effects are the opposite of intent: her husband assists in the partial-ruination of the family, she is divided based on their traditional reaction, and Vito has assumed secondary responsibilities. The wedding is a symbol of their inability to love outside their constructed social norms -- Sicilian, Catholic, Omerta -- and those repressive survival responses are the end. Michael's reign is the antithesis of all that wedding indicates. The sequel starts with a funeral, the genesis of Vito's new persona and of all the wedding implies: in New York, he marries and fathers while organizing his thefts -- he works for the love and loyalty of his friends and family, and in reciprocity, he adapts to their perceived needs. His adaptation demands the conditions for his death as his death is an indirect result of his adaptation. Sonny's death is the same: trained in his father's empire and desirous of his sister's happiness, he was betrayed, butchered, responding to her husband. His ethics, his superego, sought what he thought fair compensation for his sister's suffering but he was responding to an insult on himself, his father and their shared identity -- and sharing that spirit, his death ends his father's reign. He 'don't apologize' for his actions but he attempts to escape them with his grandson, dying of a heartattack in midplay. His funeral carries over into the second picture: his escape from Sicily starts the creation of a new self, manifested and foiled in Don Fanucci -- a repulsive parasitic character anathema to Vito but a subverted reflection. His execution is the best scene in the films: Christ images, a dialectical montage, Vito as the underclass and Fanucci as the upper...Fanucci's murder is Vito's intellectual suicide and rebirth. And second is Siciliy: he returns for business growth and revenge, another Fanucci-act. Don Ciccio is another pseudofather figure he removes to establish himself as a dominant figure, but one with a superior ethical code. He fathers himself and his vicinity. The film's title is apt. His reaction to violence and oppression is a mild reformation leading back to its true character. Vito's flawed attempt at love and reclaimed family, within a capitalistic structure, negated any validity in his efforts.

3.
Michael is his father without the primordial need for a new family -- he's inherited his and discards them in ease. Kay he loves at the beginning but divides from her. She is alien to the life he selects and her loss is the start of his personal decline. His two wives reflect his acceptance of family: he wants to escape with her, somewhere, as his sister married to escape into some filmic fantasy romance, he sought Kay for love, its only genuine realization in the film(s) shortened in circumstance. She rifts him over to a more Americanized side of immigrant life, a less artificial acceptance of their standards and an attack on the half-reaction of his family and father. But his first devotion overturns this and when exiled he marries Apollonia. She is his first partial acceptance of his father's identity and a projection of his need for affection and embrace in a country prominent but peripheral to his perspective. He courts her in the Sicilian custom and their relationship is both genuine and Michael's actualization, his embrace of his new (and old) self. She is his Sicilian side and he attempts a mild Americanization (driving, English lessons). She dies in his botched execution and his loss caps his character's full change. He is his father and he kills his father's legacy: his responsibilities sever his relationship with Kay, and her abortive rebellion against tradition ruins their connection in total. His methods counter his father's diplomacy or coercion. He murders Fredo -- and audiences everywhere understood this as his Fanucci, his self-suicide.

4.
The whole film centers on familial death. Vito's first family sends him abroad where he recreates it for defense and closure. Michael moves closer to his father and Fredo betrays his brother to spite the protective role his father felt was best for him. Each attack, internal or out, is the moment a new character is created and new opportunities are seized. Its moral seems sutured to Bakunin's Creative-Destruction quote.

5.
That dialectic is illustrated best in the first section's ending montage. The value of the creation is aided by the love: Vito needed his family and related to them in an intimate manner, and Michael's reversal of that is a reversal of his father's initial motivation. Duality in the appropriation of Eisenstein's intellectual montage, used to suggest already apparent thematic structures -- the baptized infant is Michael as much as the murders -- even if the theme is informed by the audience feeling and can realize the intellectual content in reflection. All films use the Jungian structure: Persona is feeling, Ego is character motivation, Unconscious is opposition, Collective Unconscious is symbolic and Intellectual Montage is its synthesis. Example: Michael is, like his father, the Old Man archetype -- wisdom and direction. The baby is his Self and the background brutality his Shadow. The juxtaposition indicates his awareness of the relationship between Self and Shadow, and a belief in his acquired responsibilities. The birth and the death of a new somebody.

6.
Common criticisms of Coppola are his reduction in quality after filming Apocalypse Now. He just stopped shooting neurotic pictures and directs films he knows will let him sanity stay. His new stance is directorial distance, a contrast to the lived experience of The Godfather(s), The Conversation and Apocalypse Now.

7.
Coppala asserted the films were a condemnation of Capitalism -- as he made some of the highest earning pieces in cinematic history. Any real criticism of that structure is as subliminal as the thematics in the climax.

8.
Not unlike The Wire, its theme should be: any individual is unable to affect change against a stronger apparatus without being changed for it.

9.
Conclusion: 5/5. I cannot seem to review films I dislike.