Coppola’s last visit to the Corleones is handsomely built and often moving, with Pacino tired and grey and Andy Garcia hungry beside him. But the Vatican plot never comes clear, the daughter is miscast, and at 162 minutes it feels every one of them.
Sixteen years after The Godfather Part II, Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo go back to Michael Corleone and find him old. It is 1979, his hair is grey and cropped, and he wants the one thing money in his trade has never bought him, which is a clean name. The plan is to take control of Immobiliare, a European property company, with the Vatican’s bank as partner and Archbishop Gilday (Donal Donnelly) as the man with his hand out. The Godfather Part III is beautifully made, honestly felt and, for long stretches, a muddle.
Pacino plays Michael as a man who has spent twenty years indoors. The voice has dropped to a rasp, he moves as if his joints hurt, and when he loses his temper it comes out as a cough. This Michael wants approval, and Pacino lets us see what it costs him. Andy Garcia’s Vincent Mancini gives the film its pulse. He walks into the opening party in a leather jacket among the dinner suits, and every scene he enters gets faster. Joe Mantegna makes Joey Zasa a vain street boss in beautiful tailoring, and Eli Wallach’s Don Altobello is an old man made of sugar and kisses.
We were moved, more than we expected, and early. At the party, Michael’s son Anthony (Franc D’Ambrosio) tells him he is leaving law school to sing, and later that evening sings him an old Sicilian song. Pacino sits with his hands folded and listens, Gordon Willis holds the shot, and the face gives way in a manner we had not seen in two films. We came braced for a sequel made for the money and found a film about a man who wants to be forgiven and has left it late.
The craft is as good as the series ever had. Willis shoots the New York rooms in the dark ambers he used in 1972, faces lit from one side and the rest left to go black, and when the film reaches Sicily he opens the windows and the stone goes the colour of bread. Dean Tavoularis dresses the Corleone flat in dark wood, old paintings and heavy curtains. Milena Canonero puts Michael in charcoal and Vincent in black leather, then moves Vincent into suits as he climbs. Carmine Coppola’s score leans on the waltz and the love theme from the earlier films and adds heavier brass under the Vatican scenes.
The trouble is the business. The first two films made Michael’s deals as clear as his killings; here the deal is a share purchase involving a lawyer, B.J. Harrison (George Hamilton), an archbishop, a bank and a board in Rome, and we sat through several meetings about it without being able to say afterwards who owed whom what. Walter Murch, Lisa Fruchtman and Barry Malkin cut each scene cleanly; what they cannot do is make us care which cassock is which. Somewhere in the second hour, during another conversation about percentages, we were bored, and then cross about being bored by something this beautifully lit.
Then there is Mary. Sofia Coppola plays Michael’s daughter, and she is plainly not a trained actor; the lines come out flat, and her scenes with Garcia, which need heat, have none. The fault is not hers. It belongs to a production that asked a beginner to carry the feeling of a 162-minute film and then stood her next to Pacino. Diane Keaton’s Kay gets two scenes in which to be sad and right, and Talia Shire’s Connie, who has hardened into something like a consigliere in black, is the more interesting woman and gets less time.
Raf Vallone’s Cardinal Lamberto has one long scene with Michael in a courtyard, and it is the best-written thing in the film. The last movement, built around Anthony’s operatic debut in Palermo, cuts between the stage and the family’s business in the manner of the baptism in the first film, and for twenty minutes the old confidence is back. It is a long wait for it.
See it after the other two, and not too soon after, when you are ready to spend an evening with a tired man rather than a dangerous one. As an epilogue it has real feeling in it, and Pacino and Garcia are reason enough to stay to the end. It carries a 15.
