Defending “The Godfather: Part III” has become like defending Frank Sinatra Jr. or “The Matrix: Revolutions.” People: It’s not that bad. In fact, it’s really good.
Okay, it isn’t a classic like the first two, and it suffers further by comparison to “Goodfellas,” which came out just a few weeks before it. But “Part III,” which arrives on Blu-ray May 13, was still one of the best movies of its year (1990), thanks in large part to a devastating and necessary ending: Up to this point, Michael Corleone’s evil had never been repaid with adequate suffering. And the King Lear-like climax on the steps of the opera house in Sicily, punctuated by Michael’s mostly silent scream, provides a legitimately Shakespearean finish to the saga.
What everyone knows about the film is that, at the last minute, Winona Ryder dropped out of playing the key role of Michael’s daughter Mary Corleone and director Francis Ford Coppola unwisely replaced her with his own daughter, Sofia, who wasn’t a trained actress. It showed. As an actress, Sofia is bland and whiny, though in her favor, it must be said that she seems much like the spoiled princess that Mary is supposed to be.
Bad as she is, though, she doesn’t ruin the picture. (Wouldn’t you love your daughter equally if she were kind of insipid?) If you didn’t know she was Coppola’s daughter, you’d just think, “That actress isn’t very good,” and you wouldn’t obsess over her.
“Part III” has much else to recommend it: A thrillingly chaotic, completely unexpected shootout in a rooftop meeting room in Atlantic City, an equally well-staged bloodbath at the Little Italy street fair the Feast of San Gennaro, an intriguing conspiracist take on the events at the Vatican in 1979 (when three popes presided within a span of two months) and several more classic lines of dialogue added to the canon.
There’s “Treachery is everywhere”; “Finance is a gun — politics is knowing when to pull the trigger”; “It’s dangerous to be an honest man”; “Never hate your enemies — it affects your judgment”; and “He who builds on the people, builds on mud.” And let’s not forget the classics: “I don’t need tough guys, I need more lawyers” and “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”
The convoluted plot revolves around the efforts of ex-crime boss Michael (Al Pacino) to maintain his now-legitimate businesses and move into the big time by buying a chunk of a European real estate company from the Vatican.
But as Michael’s brother Sonny’s bastard son Vincent (Andy Garcia) swaggers onto the scene and starts flirting with his own first cousin Mary (setting up Mary’s awful line, “Then I love him first”), two crime bosses (Eli Wallach and Joe Mantegna) force Michael back into gang warfare.
The movie’s biggest flaw is its nostalgic, backward-looking atmosphere, which leads director Coppola and co-writer Mario Puzo to restage inferior versions of the greatest hits from the first two movies. It’s unnecessary for Michael to remind us, for instance, that Vincent “has a temper like his father,” and for Coppola to give Vincent a scene where he blurts out his opinion, the same move that touched off the gang war in the first film.
But Garcia (who got an Oscar nomination) is terrific as the cocksure young wannabe who turns out to be surprisingly capable in a crisis, and who gradually tames his hair and smartens his wardrobe to fit in with the businesslike Corleones. His yearning is to be part of something, to shoot his way into the family, but on the downhill slope of life, Michael is simultaneously showing us the isolating effects of evil.
An early scene mimicking the famous wedding reception that opens the original film concludes with Michael by himself in his armchair. It’s a warning, an uneasy parody of his father being surrounded by sycophants and well-wishers. The concluding shot of the film is even lonelier.
The only woman left in Michael’s life, really, is his sister, Connie (Talia Shire), and the trilogy is also a story of her descent. Maintaining her early cluelessness, she’s so self-deluding, she actually believes her brother Fredo drowned in Lake Tahoe (everyone else understands that Michael had him killed), and yet at the same time she has a Lady Macbeth quality, constantly urging the violence forward. Even if Michael dies, she swears, honor must be avenged in blood. Like Michael, the Ivy League boy who his family assumed lacked the strength to engage in medievally ruthless feuds and tried to keep clean, she was never supposed to be part of the game.
Even this deep in a hell of his own construction, Michael is still a somewhat appealing character who shows flashes of the man he was 35 years prior, before he emerged from that bathroom in the Bronx with a pistol in his hand. Late in “Part III,” he is still trying to rekindle the spark with Kay (Diane Keaton), making new bonds with his opera-singer son (Franc D’Ambrosio) and even confessing his many sins to a priest. As the picture concludes with a whirlwind of violence in which men less honorable than Michael meet their fates, we still have hope that he can somehow find redemption. That’s why it’s so painful when he pays the worst imaginable price for everything he’s done.