Prompted, in large part, by this:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/08/the-godfather-and-style.html#entry-more
As usual, it's dense and overheated, like old spinach pie fresh out of the microwave, but there's some fascinating and acute nuggets of truth in the piece.
To sum up, with as much brevity and clarity as possible, Brody thinks that Coppola's success with the first two Godfather movies results from their being made in the right place, at the right time, by a director with just the right sensibility. It's unclear whether Brody believes that their financial, popular, and critical success is the same as their artistic success, but the point is more-or-less well taken. The Godfather (and I'm referring here to both, and will be for the duration, for reasons of simplicity and because Godfather II is so effectively and seamlessly a continuation of its predecessor) is probably the most uncontroversial "masterpiece" in the history of American cinema, surpassing even Citizen Kane, and not just because it enjoys much more popular success than Kane. It's lightning-in-a-bottle good. The harmony of mood, story, character, tone, acting, and image-making are both exquisitely sophisticated and widely palatable. It's as close to Shakespeare as American cinema has ever been - the film is both smart and broad, epic and intimate, sly and self-effacing. Coppola never really topped it, even with Apocalypse Now, which ramped up the atmosphere and became more selfconsiously Art-house without sacrificing too much of the rock-solid instinct for story that served Coppola so well (until it didn't.)
But Coppola had always been a relentless experimenter. He still is, to use only a few frames of Tetro by way of example. The neoclassical mode that Brody describes was exceptionally well-suited for the material - it was the magic moment at which Coppola's particular sensibility matched the source material. I can't speak for the collective nostalgia that Brody then evokes - this part of his essay is plainly conjecture, but it makes for an interesting theory. No doubt some of that stuff is accurate, and it makes for an interesting gloss, although it doesn't explain the lasting appeal and reverence that the Godfather inspires even now.
But for Brody, the downfall is that it was too perfect, too schematic, too composed. Thus, it becomes in his eyes contrived.
Although I'm not among those who regard this stance as sacrilegious, I do think that it's mostly wrong. All the same, it has a certain kernel of truth in it. Brody doesn't come right out and claim that the films of Cassavetes are better (in an earlier post, he compared the two filmmakers) but he does strongly imply that Cassavetes was the superior and more seminal artist. While there's nothing wrong with stating a preference, Brody has the habit of making his aesthetic judgements with the presumed authority and peremptoriness of moral, even legal judgements. This can be intermittently appealing, because it's nice to see someone who wears his convictions so proudly on his sleeve, but it can also be exasperating when it spills over into self-rightousness or puffed-up (and often incoherent) writing.
But give his assessment its due - Godfather does harken back to a bygone era, both in its form and its content; it has nostalgia built in, and nostalgia is one of the most powerful of all emotions when expressed (convincingly) aesthetically. And it does very effectively fuse the old stylistic gloss and rigor with a thoroughly modern frankness in showing the ruthlessness and cynicism of the characters, as well as in the depictions of sex and violence.
Brody doesn't begrudge Coppola his style; he merely complains that Coppola uses it for false ends, writing that as a directorial statement it is "self-effacing" and its ruminations on its subject come across as "arms-length editorial commentary."
Again, this is a statement of preference. For Brody, the ultimate aesthetic achievement is personal expression, with a heavy, even fanatical insistence upon the first word. The best directors have a signature that is as clear as it is indelible - story, character, and content are all subservient to the ideas, and most importantly the personality, of the director. Hence his longstanding and near-religious reverence for Godard, the most essayistic and personally revelatory of all directors. Many others, now and before, would disagree. The opposing view holds that the artist ought to be transparent - that it is the story, not the storyteller, that ought to be front-and-center on the screen. The ideas, personality, and quirks of the creator are all well and good if they serve the needs of the story, but once you reverse that order, you wind up with work that's self-indulgent, obscure, pretentious, etc.
It might be that this is one of those "either-or" statements of preference - Beatles vs. Stones, Picasso vs. Matisse, etc. In this case, we have Coppola vs. Cassavetes. But I like to think that such choices are always false; they don't have much value beyond their function as idle chatter, and are even detrimental if too earnestly embraced. I've come to increasingly value the "expressive/personal" over the "impersonal/craftsmanlike" in all forms, especially cinema, but the truth is that I love them both. What I'm searching for is a unified theory; a way in which I can do, and appreciate, both equally. I don't quite have it down yet, but I'm getting there.
Here's an important example: David Milch. Milch has always claimed that his definition of the successful artist is someone who disappears into his work. Taking the example of Deadwood, we can see that on one level Milch has realized his ambition. The characters are alive and wonderfully differentiated, and the story follows their struggles with the utmost loving care and meticulous attention. And yet at the same time, there is not a frame, or a line, when the presence of Milch isn't felt. He speaks through every single character in the show - one only needs to hear the man speak for a few minutes and that voice will become impossible to miss. Although Milch makes much of the idea that the story speaks for itself and on its own terms, that it has no ulterior message, that it corresponds only to an internally coherent truth, the fact is that his work is highly moral and even didactic; it is the work of someone who is searching for a "way to live." This isn't to say that it's moralizing or pedantic, but it does have a conception of an inner and underlying order and harmony, and it makes no bones about it. This can be starkly contrasted with the deeply anxious and ambivalent stance taken by David Chase, who laughs darkly at the troubling void he sees in the shadows of everyday life. What unites them both is a willingness to investigate, to seek out those shadows and dive into them. They are both relentlessly curious and driven.
So back to Coppola - what is he saying? What is his grand idea, what is the indelible mark of his personality - what can it be said he is working out with The Godfather? Here's the second part of my critique of Brody's approach. Not only does his preference (which, recall, is masked by a too-rigid aesthetic absolutism) blind him to the more subtle aspects of grace in Coppola's opus, his conception of expressiveness is overly concrete. He's looking for a commentary, a self-reflexivity, a layer of irony that doesn't exist in the film. The political subtext of The Godfather is simple and obvious and entirely beside the point. Yes, it makes for a neat allegory of capitalism and its degradation of the family, traditional values, etc. But that's not the real subtext of the film. What Coppola was really after was a family tragedy of a truly classical type - but told as a modern, personal tale. It's the story of a son trying desperately to escape the looming stature of his father, and who realizes that the only way to escape him is to destroy him, not literally, but metaphorically. He becomes the ruthless, thoroughly modern man that his father could not and would not become. He ends up destroying the values in order to preserve their (now empty) vessel/edifice. For all of it's classical, even Oedipal resonance, this is an unmistakably personal tale about the devastating impact of history and time on the family, told from a specific historical moment. The Godfather has been frequently been called a "home movie" by Coppola and by others. Coppola's presence is in the small details, the myriad tiny gestures that make up the film. It's in the recipe for marinara sauce, the little girl dancing on the feet of the tall guy, the micro-moments of which the movie is composed, finally. The truth is that The Godfather is not nearly as tightly constructed as some would make it out to be - it has longueurs and sudden, unexpected moments of explosive fury. It has that famously abrupt, even sudden, ending. It lingers and chugs along. The personal touch, the authorial closeness that Brody seeks, is there, but not in the form he's looking for; he wants ideas, but what exists is emotion, even angst.
My own take is that he's partly right. While I don't agree that G is as classical and fussily stylized as he says, there is some truth to the idea that the film does rely quite heavily on a transparent psychological realism that can sometimes seem overly straightforward.
