Third Time’s Not the Charm: The Godfather, Part III

In 1972, everyone was talking about the screen version of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. Who could forget the pageantry, the brutality, Marlon Brando stroking that cat? When awards season rolled around, The Godfather was nominated for eleven Oscars, winning Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay. (It was a great year for movies. In the Best Director category, Francis Ford Coppola was beaten out by Bob Fosse and Cabaret.)

 A mere two years later, a second Godfather film showed up on movie screens.  With Brando’s Vita Corleone dead and gone, Godfather II focused on son and heir Michael (Al Pacino), now a reluctant crime boss trying to reconcile himself to his new power. Michael’s story in the present day is interwoven with that of Vito as a young man (Robert De Niro) leaving Sicily in response to the massacre of his family. Unusually for a sequel, Godfather II was perhaps even more admired by critics and audiences than the initial film. It was nominated for nine Oscars, and won an impressive six, becoming the first sequel ever to be named Best Picture, even though it was up against such masterworks as Chinatown.

 You can’t blame Paramount Pictures, which had optioned Puzo’s 1969 novel, for wanting to take full advantage of its golden goose, even though, after the release of Godfather II,  Coppola considered the Corleone saga complete. That’s why Paramount hired a string of established writers and directors to come up with Part III. Some versions had the Corleones working with the CIA in Latin America. One involved a turf war with the Irish Mafia in Atlantic City. In another, Michael Corleone is killed early on, and the entire focus is on his surviving children.

 Some twenty years later, Puzo and Coppola were finally persuaded to return to the project, and much of the original cast signed on. The focus is now entirely on an ageing Michael, still trying to balance his criminal activities with a desire to lead a worthy life. It’s striking to see what time has done to the familiar Corleone family members. Michael is greying and fighting health problems. His estranged wife Kay (Diane Keaton) has a rather silly new hairdo, and her sadness over the hand she’s been dealt is a bit hard to buy. (Since we’ve all seen Keaton be adorably addled in Annie Hall, it’s easy to think she’d face tragedy with a blithe and dithering la-di-da.) Michael’s sister Connie (Talia Shire), whom we first met as a jubilant bride in Part One, has been turned by circumstance into a black-clad angel of death. New characters include Michael and Kay’s grown children. Son Anthony, who has turned his back on his father’s murderous ways, aspires to be an opera singer, and his stage debut in Palermo (in an opera that features Godfather-style violence) provides a nice excuse for the entire family to end up in Sicily. Daughter Mary (played by Coppola’s own daughter, future director Sofia) is her dad’s loyal sidekick. Her performance was much derided back in the day, but the truth is that it’s a thanklessly unconvincing role. And of course there are lots of thugs, connivers, and assassins-in-waiting. (Watch out if you see a cop or a priest on the streets; he’s probably a killer in disguise.)

 What makes Godfather III worth watching? Coppola is still brilliant at staging public spectacle:  a street fair, a night at the opera, an innocent-seeming place where danger lurks. Palermo and Manhattan both look gorgeous. And the music—that plaintive trumpet theme—lures us into a story that might not be quite worth telling.

 

 

The Bling Ring: Robbing the Rich to Keep for Yourself

You’ve seen the headlines about mobs of teenagers ripping off major department stores, loading up on trendy fashions and expensive jewelry and then disappearing into the night. It’s a recent phenomenon and an ugly one, reflecting have-not kids (often in thrall to older crooks) and their willingness to create chaos because they feel cheated out of an expensive lifestyle. 

 Filmmaker Sofia Coppola explored a different kind of “bling ring” in 2013, focusing on a real-life group of upper-middle-class SoCal teens who made it into the pages of Vanity Fair after being arrested for breaking into the homes of pop culture celebs (Paris Hilton! Lindsay Lohan!) and running off with some $3 million worth of cash and belongings. Coppola’s version, which she wrote and directed, fictionalizes the actual kids but sticks close to their crimes and motives. Taking advantage of Coppola’s usual cinéma vérité stylistics, it conveys the excitement of pampered teenagers, whom Coppola herself has called "products of our growing reality TV culture,” emulating their small-screen idols by literally swiping the expensive toys with which the stars surround themselves in their natural habitat. The original Vanity Fair article, by Mary Jo Sales, was called “The Suspects Wore Louboutins,” and within Coppola’s film we see the members of the informal gang (including its one boy) happily modeling Louboutins, Rolexes, and other expensive trinkets in their own bedrooms, with their parents totally oblivious to what they’re up to.  

 Coppola’s has been an interesting career. She is, of course, the daughter of a one-time Hollywood Young Turk (and one of Roger Corman’s  early protégés),Francis Ford Coppola, who segued from 1963’s Dementia 13 to 1972’s Oscar-winning The Godfather and its sequels. When making 1990’s The Godfather, Part III, Francis Coppola found himself short an ingenue, and gave the part intended for Winona Ryder to his own daughter, who had to put up with scathing reviews of her performance. Somehow she survived that debacle, and launched her own feature-film writing and directing career with The Virgin Suicides in 1999. This grim but fascinating adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’ debut novel was followed by Lost in Translation, which garnered 4 Oscar nominations, including best director. At that point in Hollywood history, no woman had ever won an Oscar for directing, and Coppola too was shut out . . . but she did take home a statuette for her very original screenplay about two Americans adrift in after-hours Tokyo. Since then, she’s directed about seven other films, including an anachronistic life of Marie Antoinette and an upcoming biopic about Priscilla Presley.

 There’s no denying her cinematic skill, nor her unique perspective on young women in positions of power. But if we’re being uncharitable we can also view her as one of Hollywood’s Nepo Babies, the children of movieland royalty for whom doors open. It’s hardly surprising that such well-endowed young people spark resentment in those who were not so auspiciously born.  Still, everyone is a bit gaga about Hollywood connections, however obscure. One of the kids in The Bling Ring, the young boy who seems less comfortable than the others in taking what doesn’t belong to him, has a dad with industry ties, perhaps one reason he is accepted as part of this Hollywood-obsessed crew. But, as The Bling Ring shows, he earns one of the harshest sentences doled out by the legal system. By way of contrast, the character played by Harry Potter’s Emma Watson (the one big name in this very young and mostly unknown cast) is terrific as Nicki, who puts on a great show of contrition and basic innocence. Now that’s acting!  

 

The Virgin Suicides of Five Little Women

I’ve just watched the beautiful and talented Kirsten Dunst, at 12, play snippy little Amy March—a schoolgirl obsessed with fashion, popularity, and nice noses—in the 1994 screen version of Little Women. What a shock to jump five years and see Dunst as a very different young woman in Sofia Coppola’s debut film, The Virgin Suicides.

The Virgin Suicides, based on a sensational 1999 novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, was the then-twenty-eight-year-old Coppola’s debut as a film director. She has said that prior to reading the novel, she had no clear artistic path. It was her intense enthusiasm for this book that led her to adapt it for the screen, and then to find her calling as a director. She loved this novel because—grim as it was—it seemed to capture her sense of young womanhood as a time of transition, a tumultuous passage from innocent girlishness into the powers (and fears) of an adult female life. Eugenides is the rare author who wholeheartedly praises the film made from his novel. He notes, though, that in his mind the tale had chiefly focused on the young suburban boys who obsessed from a distance over the macabre doings of the five gorgeous Lisbon sisters. The film version, he notes, necessarily puts the five beautiful blondes at the visual center of the action, giving us clues to their surprising choices, though by no means putting their mysteries to rest.

Yes, this is a film about suicide, beginning with that of the youngest Lisbon, Cecilia. She had previously explained her nihilistic mindset to an emergency room doctor who gently chided, “What are you doing here, honey? You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets.” Her matter-of-fact response: “Obviously, Doctor, you've never been a 13-year-old girl.”

The young teenaged sisters so vividly depicted in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women were facing real problems: poverty, serious illness, an absent father wounded on the field of battle, the rigidly circumscribed role of a young lady in 19^th century America. Yet, blessed with lively minds, strong moral fiber, and a sublimely understanding mother, they all coped—and even managed to truly enjoy the innocent frolics of their girlhood. It’s startling to move from the world of Little Women to late twentieth-century suburbia, where the Lisbon family sends its daughters to a tony local school. The Lisbons seem to have no health issues and no particular money woes. True, Mom (Kathleen Turner) and Dad (James Woods, as the school’s math teacher) are intense both in their Catholic devotions and in their household rules of conduct. They don’t seem the sort of parents you’d come to with your personal woes. Maybe that’s why Cecilia, at thirteen, is so determined to end it all. And maybe it’s also why fourteen-year-old Lux (played Dunst) finds her own ways to rebel against the family’s rigid standards of behavior. Hardly virginal, Lux seems committed to giving herself to any boy who’s tempted by her beauty. 

Commenting on The Virgin Suicides years after the film was made, Dunst has noted that her role required her to explore the rawer emotions of the adult world she was personally poised to enter.  Though she’d been acting professionally since age 7, this was her first offbeat independent production, as well as perhaps her first chance to delve into her own sexuality on screen. That’s something Amy March and her older sisters never seem to do. Which makes the world of Little Women, for all its hardships, a friendlier place than the one the Lisbon girls so uneasily inhabit.