{"id":660,"date":"2016-11-16T12:53:46","date_gmt":"2016-11-16T17:53:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/?p=660"},"modified":"2016-11-16T12:53:46","modified_gmt":"2016-11-16T17:53:46","slug":"shaping-the-world-with-the-godfather","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/shaping-the-world-with-the-godfather\/","title":{"rendered":"Shaping the world with The Godfather"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Luke Parker, sports editor<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cI said to my wife for justice, we must go to Don Corleone,\u201d a desperate man tells the Don, who sits calmly in his darkly-lit office.\u00a0 The man wants vengeance on the two men who assaulted his daughter \u2013 he wants them dead.\u00a0 \u201cThat I cannot do.\u201d\u00a0 The Don replies, with an ease much too calm for the topic.\u00a0 \u201cWe\u2019ve known each other many years, but this is the first time you ever came to me for counsel, for help.\u00a0 I can\u2019t remember the last time that you invited me to your house for a cup of coffee,\u201d the Don explains.\u00a0 But he ends up helping the man anyway, telling him to accept his gesture as a gift on his daughter\u2019s wedding day.<\/p>\n

That is how Francis Ford Coppola\u2019s epic, The Godfather, begins, and already, the audience is a part of the Corleone family. No Sicilian can refuse a request on the day of his daughter\u2019s wedding, so Don Vito (Marlon Brando) spends a large portion of the ceremony inside with the family lawyer, Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), exchanging favors similar to the one above.<\/p>\n

He eventually joins the party, which is in full throttle, and it is there that the other members of the family are introduced: Connie (Talia Shire) is the bride, who joyously dances throughout the party \u2013 it is the happiest we will see her for the rest of the film \u2013 there is Fredo and Sonny (John Cazale and James Caan), the two sons who run the business with their father, and finally, there\u2019s Michael (Al Pacino).\u00a0 He, the youngest son, doesn\u2019t live with the family.\u00a0 In other words, he is not involved, and it seems that he, and his father, try very hard to keep it that way.<\/p>\n

Michael brings his girlfriend, Kay (Diane Keaton), to the wedding, and explains to her, and the audience, what it is his family does.\u00a0 The conversation is sparked by the entrance of a famed Italian singer named Johnny Fontane.\u00a0 Kay questions how Michael\u2019s family could know him, and he tells the story: when Fontane was starting out, he was stuck in a contract that was stagnating his career.\u00a0 Vito and one of his men visited Fontane\u2019s boss, and after negotiations, got him out of the contract for the fraction of the price.\u00a0 \u201cHow did he do that?\u201d\u00a0 Kay asks.\u00a0 He tells her that his father made him an offer he couldn\u2019t refuse \u2013 they put a gun to his head and \u201cassured him that either his brains or his signature would be on the contract.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is the first glimpse we, the audience, get of the Corleone\u2019s power.\u00a0 It won\u2019t be the last, but believe it or not, we never see a victim of that power.\u00a0 This is because the film is presented in the closed world of the family \u2013 it is the only way the audience can become attached to these characters whom they would otherwise be afraid of \u2013 and when an order is given, that is the end of it.\u00a0 For example, we don\u2019t see the desperate man\u2019s wish get \u201ctaken care of\u201d from the opening scene.\u00a0 We can only assume that the assaulters got what was coming to them.\u00a0 By leaving the violence up to the audience\u2019s imagination, Coppola establishes the Corleone family as a much more haunting superpower than he could by showing it on screen.\u00a0 It is not until the end of the film that we see a Corleone order carried out.\u00a0 And when it finally arrives, it is as chilling, and strangely, as satisfying as the audience had probably hoped.<\/p>\n

The interesting thing about the title is that it refers not to the father Vito, but to the son Michael.\u00a0 The Brando performance has become so iconic in film (though Pacino deserves just as much credit) that it is easy for anyone to assume that the story is about him.\u00a0 But it is not.\u00a0 It is about Michael, who, throughout the film, slowly creeps into the high chair of the family.\u00a0 For a large portion of the three-plus hour runtime, however, that is not the case.\u00a0 Michael tries to resist, and he does.\u00a0 For a while.\u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s my family Kay, it\u2019s not me.\u201d\u00a0 He tells his reluctant girlfriend, who eventually becomes the only character that wants to keep Michael from the mob life.\u00a0 It isn\u2019t until the attempted assassination of his father and a dire situation in which he must rescue the defenseless Vito by relocating him into another hospital room that Michael accepts his fate.\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019m with you now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Michael gets revenge soon after, killing the corrupt police officer and a member of the family responsible for his father\u2019s shooting.\u00a0 He is then sent to hide in Sicily, where he meets Apollonia.\u00a0 They fall in love and are married.\u00a0 It is difficult to understand what Michael is thinking here \u2013 he has Kay back in the states, and now he has a wife in Sicily.\u00a0 But maybe Michael just understands his situation better than the audience.\u00a0 He doesn\u2019t know how long he is going to stay in Italy, and when he makes his return to America, he will be a part of the mob; his normal life is gone.\u00a0 Perhaps his last decision with a moral mind was to leave Kay out of his family\u2019s affairs.\u00a0 That\u2019s the most the audience can hope for.<\/p>\n

A story of trust, love, vengeance, and destiny, Godfather remains one of the top movies of all time.\u00a0 Few films have had the impact Coppola\u2019s has had on the perception of a lifestyle \u2013 it has shaped how many people view the mafia, and gives perhaps the most accurate take on how their lives are run.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Luke Parker, sports editor \u201cI said to my wife for justice, we must go to Don Corleone,\u201d a desperate man tells the Don, who sits calmly in his darkly-lit office.\u00a0 The man wants vengeance on the two men who assaulted his daughter \u2013 he wants them dead.\u00a0 \u201cThat I cannot do.\u201d\u00a0 The Don replies,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":661,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-feature"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/the-godfather-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=660"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":662,"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660\/revisions\/662"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}