Three 2011 films versus ‘The Godfather Part III’: no competition

A journey to America and back – four films: ‘The Artist’, ‘The Descendants’, ‘The Iron Lady’ – and ‘The Godfather Part III’ (without the gory or body bits) Beautiful in black and white, perfect swing back to the twenties, pretty people falling in love, but ‘The Artist’ was light-weight. The story was paper thin. And the hero redeemed by a dancing girl’s love is a selfish narcissus who became a stubborn selfish Luddite narcissus. Nothing heroic anywhere. ‘The Descendants’ was much better with great performances from Clooney playing the cuckolded rich lawyer from a family that owns virgin land in Hawaii, and Shailane Woodley, playing a full of teenage angst daughter who tells Clooney his dying wife was a cheat. Clooney finds the guy who cuckolded him and refuses to sell the virgin land. Very good. But we’re no where near a cathartic moment.

The script writers for ‘The Iron Lady’ could have taken any number of story lines to give us such a moment - winning the Tory leadership campaign and silencing the wets;
beating Callaghan and leaving Kinnock in the sound bite lane of politics; the Falklands; shutting up Scargill and banal atheistic socialism; and of course the final betrayal. But instead we kept on ending up in her London flat with Dennis appearing and disappearing and history lesson like flashbacks to all these events. At the end Dennis finally leaves - in a glow of light. Wow. So the big story about Margaret Thatcher is that eventually she gets to accept that her husband has died. What a waste, especially as Meryl Streep is probably the finest film actress of our generation. Maybe it was very clever, but the dementia scenes had little dramatic impact. They were irritating, and of course very discourteous to Mrs Thatcher. 

That’s the best of 2011. So to the Classic Section on the menu and ‘The Godfather Part III’. Nothing lightweight or irritating here. With the opening bars of the famous music we are taken in to the absorbing story of Michael Corleone (Al Pacino). We had last seen him alone in the early morning light after ordering the murder of his own brother, an utterly damned anti-hero who had tried to drag us into his amoral world. Here there is a tortuous journey towards some sort of redemption: gifts to the church, taking a wild nephew under his wing, reaching out to his wife, selling his Mafia interests, and eventually making a confession. And unlike the fare from 2012 there is certainly intense catharsis. His son has been a great success at the opening night of the opera, the family are together coming down the wide steps of the opera house, and so - as we always knew it would - the shots ring out for Michael Corleone. But the bullet sinks into his daughter. Michael collapses over her corpse and. he lets out an anguished scream, which Frank Coppola rightly shows us in slow motion. It is Shakespearean. The moral of the comparison between the 2011 films and ‘The Godfather Part III’? It’s the story that matters most.