I Hate THE GODFATHER

Where's my Act I?

No I don’t.  In fact, I admire The Godfather very much.  However, I do not consider it one of the best movies I’ve ever seen – nor even the best movie of 1972 involving amoral male vendetta seizure (no points for guessing the movie I’m claiming is The Godfather‘s better).

However, even qualified praise for The Godfather is considered in most film-buff circles to be blasphemous.  Practically any sampling of ten random moviegoers will include someone that numbers it as one of their favorites.  Everything from “sleeping with the fishes” to “an offer he can’t refuse” has maneuvered its way into general speak.  The Michael Corleone performance catapulted Pacino from a nobody to the second coming of his onscreen father.  The film is held to be so very near flawless that I found myself almost apologizing for my problems with it upon my last viewing.

We often think of bad movies as the ones impervious to criticism.  No feminist or battered-spouse organizations, however vocal, were going to put a dent in New Moon‘s earnings (I don’t actually think that’s a bad movie, but that’s another subject).  Hell, in some cases, a movie’s patent absurdity becomes almost like a badge of honor.  However, The Godfather stands among an entirely different subset of scrutiny-impervious movies – one whose goodness is so conditioned and so foregone that to merely voice practical complaints sounds like antagonistic cruelty.

What practical complaints, do you ask?  What storytelling faults could a child like me have identified in Coppola’s masterwork?  Well, for starters, I was struck on this most recent viewing how short the movie is.  Yes, it’s three hours, but that isn’t long at all considering the breadth of story and the fact that the first half-hour takes place at the opening wedding and is all introductions.  We barely get to know Luca Brasi, the crooked cop or any of the rival gangsters whose deaths have such import later on.  Even at three hours, the movie feels a little simplistic about these peripheral figures (something I don’t feel in the longer, broader sequel).

I’m in agreement with basically anyone else who’s ever seen the movie that Brando is superb as the elder Corleone, whose years of ethical neglect have caught up to him.  I’ve seen the sequel, so I know the details of his moral deterioration, but even if I hadn’t, Brando’s mannerisms would have been sufficient.  As a screenwriter, I should be arguing on behalf of putting everything into the words and the imagery, but, frankly, a performance like this shows how meaningless the details can become.  Regardless of what he’s saying or what’s going on around him, Vito Corleone’s entire history is evident in the movie.

Michael’s – not so much.  That’s not to say Pacino is bad – not by a long shot – but he is not yet the master Brando is at suggesting a character’s entire life in a moment.  This actually becomes problematic, as it is Michael’s and not Vito’s arc which drives the movie’s plot.  Movie lore celebrates Michael Corleone as the straight-laced good kid who rebelled against his criminal family before being unwittingly sucked into it, maelstrom style.  Yeah, he’s wearing an Army uniform in the opening scene, but we never really get a sense of Michael the defected son.

Many viewers may forget, but Pacino has no scenes between the opening at the wedding and the curbside exchange where he discovers his father is wounded.  His guilt and remorse on nearly losing his father is meant to be his tipping point into the life of a gangster, but, truth be told, it’s basically the start of where we get to know him.  I feel that one or two screaming matches between Michael and his brothers or Michael and his father would have been critical in that opening hour, so we’d have a better sense of his contempt for the family business.  Pacino seems dark and sinister almost by nature, so one scene in a military get-up was not enough to convince me this was the good son.  Again, I know the movie is already three hours, but maybe it needed to be four (or maybe those scenes with the anonymous first wife needed to go).

I do not by any stretch of the imagination hate The Godfather.  But these matters of reputation over merit and legend over reality are very important to me.  When history takes three hours of cinematic drama and turns it into a cultural cornerstone, it damns a whole generation of moviegoers to skewed expectations and unfulfilling experiences.  In an ideal world, movies would exist in a continuum beyond the reach of societal corruptions – and could thence be evaluated only on their own internal qualities.  In this world, however, lost entities like Michael Corleone’s Act I are seldom missed.

The War with Page Sixty-One

As I reckon it, most scripts require at least a handful of nervous breakdowns to complete.  By nervous breakdown, I’m not talking about the strictest sense – nothing worthy of institutionalization.  But anything from hair tearing to snapping at loved ones to the erosion of the notion that you ever possessed even a flicker of talent, that’s all par for the course.

I’m no method writer.  When I write a break-up scene or a gruesome death, I don’t need to simulate any emotions.  I like to keep a healthy distance between my life and my work.  I don’t write autobiographical characters.  There’s no veiled rendition of an old flame or the one who got away.  Therefore, the only way a script can bring me to tears is through its own difficulty or intractability in the writing of it.  And, for a script I recently finished, I remember precisely when those tearful days came to a head.  Page 61.

A guy I know famously said that American lives have no second acts; I’ve always wondered if he came to this conclusion during his years as a screenwriter.  Because, frankly, second acts aren’t easy to fashion cinematically, and I don’t think I’m the only one who thinks this.  It’s on you to keep the drama interesting, but you have to cool down from the rising of Act I, and you’re doing your best to hold your wad through until Act III, so the creation of Act II is often a morass of bad ideas and unproductive days.  By this point, you’ve crossed the Rubicon, which is to say that abandoning the script entirely, however tempting, would be more distressing than relieving.  And the more dead-end alleyways and unremarkable filler scenes you write, the more you become convinced of your screenplay’s utter dreadfulness.

I woke up one morning in early March, during a string of progressively more frustrating days, sat down, stared at my computer and simply couldn’t hold it in anymore.  I hated the script.  I went back to earlier scenes – hated them too.  Hated my title.  Hated my hero’s name.  Hated his backstory.  Hated his dialogue.  Hated the villain (and not in the ways I wanted to hate him).  I had promised a draft to my agent, so I knew I had to keep going through the hatred.  I could envision the disapproving wince on his face when he read this excrement.  I could hear him barking at me about where my talent had vanished to  (“You call yourself a writer, you son of a bitch?  Go try dog catching.”).  Oh yeah, any way I looked at this situation, it sucked.

Now, of course, I didn’t really hate all these aspects of the script.  I only thought I did because the process of carrying them through had become so arduous.  This was a particularly detailed/otherworldly type of story, and they tend to look pretty silly and preposterous before all the fine points are oriented properly.  On Page 61, the eventual tying together of the discrete elements seemed impossibly far off, and all I had were a bunch of half-formed relationships and transcendental journeys.

My fiancee puts up with a lot.  I get to be pretty sullen when my writing is stalling.  I become terse with her, shortchange what Serious Relationship Folks will know as “quality time”.  But even she couldn’t take it this day.  I was totally pessimistic, beating my chest, crying out to the gods for my gift back – and I was horrible to live with.  Great, I thought.  I’m going to lose a bride-to-be, an agent, a manager and possibly the only knack I ever had for anything.

I was staring at that number 61 in the corner of the page.  What an ugly number.  If it were 75 or, preferably, 90, the psychological satisfaction of the number may have been enough encouragement, but that 61 was like a curse.  Four solid days I looked at that 61.  I’d progress on into the 60s then delete the scenes I’d just written, assured of their incompetence.  Assured of my incompetence for dedicating my mind and my life to this “screenwriting” business.  And, most of all, assured I’d never advance this story past page 61 in any meaningful way.

Well, I did.  A few awful days, short-on-sleep nights and pre-spousal reproofs later, the ghouls of 61 finally receded into the horizon.  I came again to see the interest in those earlier scenes and in the hero’s journey; I knew once again why I’d chosen to write this script in the first place and why I so confidently ensured a draft to my representatives.  When you’re the captive of page 61′s clutches, it’s difficult as anything to see the big picture.  A screenplay or any other artistic work becomes muddled when you focus too squarely on any one detail.  On any one angle or speech or motivation.  On any page, if you like.  And it’s easy enough to say now in retrospect that the script turned out OK and all is right with the world, but when you’re in the thick of the battle, all you can see is carnage.

I conquered page 61, but his return is imminent.  I can rest easy tonight, but when I’m on page 58, 59 and 60 of the next script I’m writing, I’m not so sure.  There’s nothing like putting that final touch on your final scene – tying up all the drama and ruckus you’ve just unbridled for 100+ pages.  Nothing warms a writer’s body like finality, and the thing is, you can get there.  No matter how slippery or perilous it looks, there’s always that bridge that’s gonna bring you through Act II to your climax.  And it’s magic when you see it.  But when you have page 61 pulled over your eyes, all bets are off.