This Sicilian Thing

The Godfather celebrates its 50th anniversary this year and among the markers is the series, The Offer. Being a devoted fan of the first two Godfather films – with a slight preference for the second – I have been trying to watch the series. Like many, I have found it disappointing, boring, dishonest. The only time it comes to life is when Matthew Goode as Robert Evans appears on screen, incarnating with vibrancy everything you want a ‘70s Hollywood film producer to be (debauched, confident, slick), or when Dan Fogler as Francis Ford Coppola appears, incarnating with vibrancy everything you want an obsessed director to be (uncompromising, visionary, emotional).

One of the only interesting storylines in the series is the casting of Al Pacino as Michael, with no attention paid to Diane Keaton’s role as Kay, or how it came to be that she was cast. I mention this because I was relieved to hear, when listening to a GLoP podcast earlier this spring, that the Glopsters (John Podhoretz, Jonah Goldberg, Rob Long) agreed with something I have long thought: pretty much everyone in the original and second film was perfectly cast, but for Keaton. I adore Diane Keaton. I adore her in many of her films and I love her, or what I think I know of her, in real life. But to me she did not seem like Kay Adams Corleone, the polished WASP ideal held by Michael Corleone, wanting to escape the murk and taint of his family. She seemed too unpolished, too unsure, too unusual.

Podhoretz and crew also pointed out that the “Michael slaps Kay” scene in The Godfather Part II ought to be given an award for worst dialogue in a great movie. Again, I am in complete agreement. From “it was an abortion, just like our marriage is an abortion” to “this Sicilian thing” the conversation in that moment rings false and even laughable. In fact, it has become somewhat of a joke in my home, as I will often tell my Southern Italian partner, who hails from Molise, that I can no longer tolerate “this Molisano thing” when I am irritated about something minor. And I always say it dramatically, a la Kay. This must all end! This Molisano thing that’s been going on for 2,000 years!

Apart from the dreadful dialogue, Kay is plumb stupid in the scene. She walks into her husband’s hotel room with their children and announces that she is leaving him and has brought the children to say goodbye. What did she think? Did she think her controlling gangster husband would say, “Ok, let me call you a taxi. Give me a call and we’ll work out alimony payments. Safe travels!”? The first time I watched the scene I thought, “Doesn’t Kay know Michael?” And sure enough, Michael says to her, “Don’t you know me?” I guess she had not been paying attention for the previous decade. She goes back to Nevada with him, losing her children in the process, rather than realizing that she is in Washington D.C. and could haul her kids to the FBI and say, “Hey guys, you want to nail the guy who just outsmarted you when he testified before that Senate committee? Give me and my children and parents witness protection and you’ve got a deal.” But no.

Throughout the trilogy, Kay grates. She is passive-aggressive. When Michael proposes marriage in the first movie, she accepts, though he has – to his credit – been honest about the fact that he is now working for his father. In other words, he is telling her that if she marries him, she will be married to a gangster. She says yes and then spends the entire second film apparently shocked that she is married to a gangster and that her criminal husband does criminal things. And then, in the third – forgettable – film, The Godfather: Part III, she tells the now striving-for-redemption Michael that she preferred him when he was a “common Mafia hood.” Sheesh. Impossible to please much, Kay? Also in the third film, Kay and Michael have a sappy heart-to-heart over lunch, rehashing the past and professing their love for each other. Seriously? There was a bowl of olives in that scene that was far more captivating than the simpering conversation – I kept wanting to reach into the screen and grab one, a credit to the cinematographer.  

This is not about the alleged lack of good women’s roles, blah blah blah… There are plenty of great women’s roles out there (and there always have been). This year alone there was The Worst Person in the World, Licorice Pizza and Belfast. And Keaton, of course, has Annie Hall among her credits. In The Godfather trilogy, I always thought Connie had the best woman’s role and that her trajectory from literal punching bag to brassy, angry divorcee asking Michael for money so she and Troy Donahue could get married to devoted sister and co-Mafia Don at the end was underrated. I was hoping she would take over the family, given that Michael objected so strongly to being pulled back in.

Had the third film gone in that direction it might have been more captivating. As it stood, it was not great and there were parts that puzzled. For example, why did Anthony – who, if we follow the timeline of The Godfather Part II – was supposed to be in his late 20s in the third film, need his father’s permission to become an opera singer? When I was 21, I moved to Paris and I planned the whole trip – passport issued and ticket purchased – before informing my parents. Just do it, Anthony. True, the re-cut version, Mario Puzo’s Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, released by Coppola in December 2020, is an improvement, but only because it is shorter. If only he could have moved Mary Corleone’s death up to the first five minutes of the film, as opposed to the last. (Don’t scream at me, Sofia Coppola fans. I thought Lost in Translation was terrific.)   

A word about Michael’s “proposal” to Kay in the first film. It’s the worst. “Hey Kay, I’ve been home mourning my hot Sicilian wife and haven’t bothered to contact you for over a year, but my parents are Italian and it’s the late 1940s and they think I should get married and plus, I need kids to take over the crime family, so here I am. You don’t want to be an old maid, do you?” There is no ring, no dropping to his knee and insufficient groveling in regard to his flaws. Michael does look incredibly handsome in that hat, dark eyes all sincere as he promises he will make it up to her, but she ought to have said no and married the boring, non-sexy accountant down the road. Or hell, just been a quirky spinster, a la Diane Keaton.

And another word – this one about Apollonia, Michael’s Sicilian wife. Am I the only viewer who was relieved when she died, as her death meant we would no longer have to listen to her attempt to recite the days of the week in English?

I know that these are minor grievances in the face of two exceptional, beautiful films and one, er, adequate film – the latter made slightly more than adequate by many in the cast, the scenery and, of course, our attachment to the first two and our desire for the third movie to even come close. That desire is part of the reason I wanted to like The Offer. That attachment is the reason I love to use the lines “We are not communists” or “This is the business we have chosen” in whatever moment in my life they might be applicable. I think both are better than “Leave the gun, take the cannoli.”

On top of this, my decades-long crush on Al Pacino has my first viewings of The Godfather and The Godfather II at its root. If you want to know the strength of that crush, suffice to say that I have sat through Bobby Deerfield – not just Pacino’s worst film, but possibly one of the worst ever made. (Marthe Keller and Pacino, who have zero chemistry onscreen, fell in love during filming.) Trust me, that represents a fidelity not matched by Kay and Apollonia put together.