"The Godfather" had already come and gone well before I was born. Released in 1972, it did well enough to warrant two sequels and a fair bit of fame as one of the greatest movies ever, but none of that was such that I had the chance to...
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"The Godfather" had already come and gone well before I was born. Released in 1972, it did well enough to warrant two sequels and a fair bit of fame as one of the greatest movies ever, but none of that was such that I had the chance to see it myself until just recently. I could make a lot of excuses, certainly. There's the fact that VHS wasn't terribly common around these parts until the middle of the 80s, but then that leaves twenty years unaccounted for. Then there were my strict parents, who didn't believe in R-rated movies even for themselves, much less their children. But I've been out on my own for most of 10 years and still I hadn't seen it. Why? I guess because I figured it couldn't really be that good, that I wasn't missing out on that much. Of course, I was wrong.

Tonight, I rectified that wrong and I'm glad I did. From playing the recent video game from Electronic Arts, I knew that the story would interest me. I'd even seen a few short clips from the three-hour movie, but watching two or three minutes from the middle of the movie isn't a fruitful exercise. No, you have to start at the beginning and work forward. The beginning in this case, of course, is a wedding.

One of the things I like about "The Godfather" is that it's not afraid to take a moment to celebrate the small things that define the human condition, to make everything personal so that you not only are fascinated by the strange lives these people lead, but interested in seeing them succeed. Even as they participate in brutal activity, even as they spout off about abhorring violence while at the same time ordering a hit on someone they know can't be trusted, they are human and likeable.

The wedding is the first place where we meet Michael, a young man played by a surprisingly young Al Pacino. He's at the glorious event and he's telling his girlfriend just a little bit about the family around him. Though he's grown up around it his whole life, it's clear that he sees the fantastical side of things and doesn't really associate himself with it. He even announces rather ironically that the lifestyle he's telling his lady friend about is that of his father, not him.

Naturally, the rest of the movie lets the viewer become immersed in that lifestyle and get to know the key players in a frightening yet in some ways ideal New York of the 1940s. If you've somehow missed the movie up to this point (as I did), I'm certainly not going to spoil it with a plot summary, and if you've already seen it there's not much point in me doing so either because the story in "The Godfather" is the sort that sticks with a person perfectly well.

Suffice it to say the plot has several big twists that you probably won't see coming, yet it doesn't make them sensational. In fact, those things have been artistically downplayed, so that in a way they're more shocking to the viewer than if they had been exaggerated. This is a sort of direction we don't see much of in the current day--except in arthouse bits--and it's one of the reasons that "The Godfather" is such a beautiful film. It has all the things we go to movies to see--shootouts, intense dialogue, glorious breasts--but you don't feel like a heathen for enjoying them.

If there's a complaint to be leveled against the movie at all, it's that even at three hours, it feels way too short. When the credits started rolling I felt completely satisfied that I had seen a good movie and I knew that I would have gladly kept watching for another two or three hours. Lucky for me, they made two sequels. I'll have to make sure that I view them without waiting another 28 years.