Separate but Equal
The Godfather trilogy at once proves
and disproves the conventional wisdom that a sequel can never equal
the original in a series of films. In the case of The Godfather
Part III, the dictum holds. Though a good movie, The
Godfather Part III suffers in comparison to its predecessors
for the same reasons that sequels generally fail: surprise is harder
to come by because once successful tropes have grown stale. The
Godfather Part II, on the other hand, is in every way the
equal of The Godfather. Like its predecessor, it
is one of the great movies of the 1970s,
indeed of all cinematic history. Ranking the two films is more a
matter of taste than artistic merit. Like War and Peace and Anna
Karenina, The Godfather and The
Godfather Part II are each unique and appealing in their
own way.
This fact is all the more remarkable considering that,
unlike a trilogy such as The Lord of the Rings, The
Godfather and The Godfather Part II were
not filmed or even conceived of all at once. The Godfather is
a complete movie, and had Coppola ended his project there, no one
would have felt it was incomplete. The ability to generate a second
film as fresh and exciting as The Godfather is,
therefore, the singular achievement of the trilogy. This is possible
only because Part II is a sequel of an unusual
sort. Rather than a continuation of the first film's plot, it is
a new take on the themes of the first film and can be classified
as belonging to a different genre. The Godfather may
be classified as an epic, a multigenerational family saga told in
an almost mythical way. Part II, on the other hand,
does contain elements of epic, but feels more like a psychological
drama, narrating the making of one don (young Vito) and the personal
undoing of another (Michael). Some might even call Part
II a tragedy. Certainly, this is the element of the film
that Part III takes up, in the murder of Fredo
and the disintegration of Michael and Kay's marriage. As a whole,
the trilogy feels more like Michael's tragedy than the Corleone
family epic. But regardless of how we decide to classify the Godfather films,
the fact remains that the first two employ radically different means
of storytelling. The principle difference between the two films
is in their narrative structures, which are achieved through different
modes of editing.
