Ill-Informed Gadfly

Is it possible I never fully appreciated this movie until my most recent viewing? I always regarded “The Godfather” (1972) with great respect, but it has now blossomed into all-out love. I can’t imagine a movie more lucid, passionate and lyrical, a sprawling story so elegantly told. It deserves every accolade ever thrown its way.

For a while I think I wished for more visual and formal risk-taking out of director Francis Ford Coppola. Because of “Apocalypse Now,” “The Conversation” and even “The Godfather Part II,” with its parallel tragic and comic storylines, I knew he was capable, and I blamed studio pressure for harnessing his vast gifts. “The Godfather” is classical, elegant, measured. Coppola says on the DVD commentary that the great cinematographer Gordon Willis, whose painterly lighting brings the movie a majestic quality, was a traditionalist who insisted that every shot represent a point of view; the camera is usually about four feet off the ground, the angle flat and even. Coppola remarks that he threw in an aerial when Don Vito is gunned down, telling Willis (I’m paraphrasing) “It’s God’s point of view, it’s my point of view, whatever.”

But “The Godfather” wants for nothing. It is beautifully structured, and Coppola’s much-praised cross-cutting, in the wedding and baptism sequences, gives it a symphonic resonance. For some reason, before this most recent viewing, the story never quite came together in my mind. All this talk about which head of which family was responsible for which murder was dizzying. Michael’s decision to take them all out seemed to come from a mysterious place. No more. I see in Pacino’s performance how Michael slowly makes up his mind, with his father’s counsel, and the culpability of the other dons couldn’t be clearer.

What also came into focus this time was how Coppola is telling an essential American story. (”I believe in America” is the first line.) This theme always seemed stronger to me in “Godfather II,” but it’s right there in the first one, too: an entrepreneurial, immigrant father, passing on the family business to his son amid the postwar boom, which brings with it an uprooting from traditional immigrant enclaves (the Corleones move to Nevada).

There’s so much to say about “The Godfather,” but so much has been said. I never questioned its greatness, but now I think I understand it.