Evan D. As a project this year we are taking a trip through time to revisit all of the Best Picture winners in history, Wings to Anora. The Godfather is the forty-fifth film in that series, to see all the other Best Picture reviews, click here. **The Sound of Music will be reviewed out of order so we can see it in theaters I’ve been writing about each of the films to win best picture this year and in doing so have been able to see a tremendously diverse slate of movies in terms of genre, length, quality and — importantly — legacy. Winning Best Picture gets your film immortalized on the walls of the Dolby Theater, but in reality that says very little about what that movie means. The real delineation between these award winning films is whether they’ve endured all these years later. It is hard to imagine a film with as sterling a legacy as Francis Ford Coppola’s (Megalopolis) The Godfather. Mafioso Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) leads the Corleone crime family, handling business on the day of his daughter’s wedding. He fields a number of requests for “favors” between family portraits and cake cutting. From the very start it is clear that his story is about more than just the Italian mob, its also about an Italian-American family. Vito’s oldest son, Sonny (a fiery James Caan,) is next in line to take over if his temper doesn’t get him into trouble first. Adopted son Tom (Robert Duvall) acts as the family attorney and chief advisor, or consigliere. Then there is Michael (an incredibly restrained Al Pacino.) Mikey is the youngest and has the brightest future. He’s a war hero with an education and a lovely girlfriend (Diane Keaton.) Importantly, Vito has kept Michael at an arms length from the family business as a means of protecting him and giving him the chance to thrive in the civilian world. Everything changes with the burgeoning narcotics trade. Vito has interests in gambling and prostitution but finds the drug trade distasteful and a risk to his deep running political connections. This does not sit well with the drug barons soliciting his help and kicks off a brutal war between the five crime families in New York, resulting in Vito being shot. In the Don’s absence, the Corleone family is thrown into chaos and Michael is reluctantly pulled back into the fold. What separates The Godfather from many of its contemporary mob set films is the almost equal weighting it places on each half of the term crime family. For all the violence — and oh boy is there violence — this is a story about a father wanting his son to be better than him and a son who can’t outrun his father’s shadow. Coppola intrinsically understands that what is interesting about Mario Puzo’s story is in the relatable emotional connections these characters forge. All of that is wonderfully explored in an exciting and brilliantly paced mafia movie. Marlon Brando features in the film less than any of the marketing would indicate but he chews up every moment he has on screen. Don Corleone has this gentleness to him that Brando nourishes and then weaponizes as a counter to his brutality. Right from the iconic opening scene we see a man who has honed an intimate understanding of how to let his reputation speak for him. Al Pacino, a relative unknown at the time, is a revelation. A far cry from any other Pacino performance I’ve ever seen, there’s little of his frantic, bordering on cartoonish energy you might see in The Irishman. Film discourse often coalesces around certain films and then holds them to an impossible standard. Good movies can get co-opted by people who misunderstand what the actual text stands for. These are obviously true of the fanaticism around The Godfather, not too dissimilar to something like Citizen Kane. The thing is, this kind of adulation happens because the films are great. The Godfather actually is a miraculous achievement with a massive legacy. One of the very few Best Picture Winners that has and will continue to endure the test of time. 10/10
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