The Godfather Part III: Can it be Saved?

Since I tend to be the last to the party with most big film news I have only just learned about The Godfather Coda: The Death of Micheal Corleone, AKA Francis Ford Coppola’s attempt to redeem the albatross around the neck of his most enduring cinematic achievement.

And look, I don’t want to come of as cynical…

…but I just can’t see it working.

First of all, this isn’t the first time Coppola has done a major re-edit of one of his films. The most significant example was Apocalypse Now: Redux, which took the…novel approach of taking a great movie and adding actual hours of extraneous fluff that bring nothing but constant reiteration of the themes the original version communicated quite effectively, in effect turning the once very powerful film into an agonizing endurance test. I would love to understand what was going through Coppola’s head when he decided to spend untold time and money to make his masterpiece terrible, but even if I had it explained to me I’m not sure I could comprehend it. It should say everything that he recently released a “final cut” that was significantly shorter. But at that point where does it end? You can’t have more than one definitive edition, by the definition of the word you just can’t, YOU CAN’T DO THAT FRANCIS! WORDS MEAN THINGS, YOU CAN’T JUST KEEP…

…Ahem. Moving on.

But more significant is the issues with The Godfather part III itself. I don’t know how controversial it is to say now but The Godfather part III is a pretty bad movie. But this time I don’t want to go into that. I could talk about the the the story is absurd in a way that does not compliment the natural flow of events from the previous two movies, or how the acting is uniformly so over-the-top as to reduce the film to self-parody at points (this was the point where Al Pacino had started playing Tony Montana…and then never stopped). But that’s not the real issue with this movie.

That being said…

I feel I can safely say that The Godfather sit’s comfortably as one of the greatest movies of all time and The Godfather part II sits right by it as one of the greatest sequels. But what I think is underrated is how that was not a given. The Godfather is a story that is satisfyingly finished at the end. We have watched the near downfall of the Corleone family and Micheal losing himself in order to preserve it. If you told me back then that there would be a sequel where we spend three more hours watching Michael fall further, I would argue that that is not necessary and that it could only dilute the perfectly told story of the original. But lo and behold, Coppola really did manage to find every last bit of story there still was to tell, and now the first two The Godfather movies really do feel like two halves of a greater whole.

Then came part III, made almost twenty years later because Coppola’s star had fallen and he needed a guaranteed success. Not a great place to start from but great movies have been borne from cynical places before. But that is not what happened here. While part II managed to naturally continue the story and satisfyingly wrap up hanging threads like Micheal’s wife slowly breaking her naivety and his brother Fredo’s increasingly destructive incompetence, part III’s greatest sin is that it’s just a run-around. Character beats and plot points return and continue just so that they can end up going right back to square one. Notably Micheal and Kay begin to reconcile, which is absurd enough after what happened in the second movie but they end up being torn apart by Michael’s life of crime once again.

The second movie ended with Michael alone, having lost, driven off, or killed all his family. We are left in his position, left to reflect on how disgusted his father Vito would be with him, having flashed to to Vito’s uprising and seen how he became a crime boss entirely to protect his children. Coppola said that his intent with part III was to see Michael properly punished, but I’d argue that part of part II was a far stronger punishment than simply seeing him die alone because of a bizarre string of contrivances. It’s three hours of piling on to the ending of part II. This is really what makes it such a bad movie; it adds nothing. At the end of movie two Micheal drove Kay off and killed Fredo and had to live with that. At the end of movie three he lost Kay again, Fredo is still dead and he still has to live with it. Then he dies old and alone. The last scene is the only one that adds anything, and frankly I could have inferred that this was his future on my own. How else was Micheal Corleone ever going to die but alone? Did we need a whole three hour movie just to see that?

So no, I don’t see how this new cut can be much of an improvement. Sure, maybe it will be a less bad movie, maybe even an enjoyable one in it’s own right. I don’t know how a re-edit can fix a bad plot and bad acting but I’ve seen some pretty drastic repair jobs in my time. If Kingdom of Heaven can be turned into a great movie than anything is possible. But The Godfather part III is parasitic by nature, and I just don’t see how that can be fixed. If your going to continue one of cinema’s greatest stories you had better really have something to add, and part III just doesn’t.

I’d argue the best thing about this version already is the title, which goes out of it’s way to distance this movie from the other two. It’s not Part 3, it’s the Coda. It’s the epilogue to the real story. Still no good reason to watch it but at least it’s more honest. That is, in fact, something.