Film Analysis: The Godfather, written by a high school student

The most enthralling texts to study are those that explore individual issues with universal significance.

In 1979, The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola presents the journey of Michael Corleone, a legitimate young man who becomes the head of a family of organised crime. Coppola highlights Michael’s road to moral decline through a clever confluence of visual and verbal features. This journey ultimately serves to address the human condition and our universal potential for moral corruption.

In the opening sequence of the Godfather, Michael is depicted as a legitimate individual, a virtuous needle in the haystack of the family corporate crime business. This is illustrated even before Michael’s arrival at his sister’s wedding. Vito Corleone, his father and head (Don) of the family, postpones the family photo to wait for Michael. This suggests, immediately that Michael is a character that is respected and admired.  When he arrives, Michael’s costume serves to establish him as virtuous. He wears a military uniform, decorated with badges, in contrast to the criminals around him and is later mentioned by a police officer as a “war hero”. Kay, his love interest, wears a bright sunset orange dress which, too, contrasts with the surround black and white. This conveys the message that Michael’s interests lay outside the corporate crime family. A notion that is cemented when Michael states “That’s my family Kay, not me”. The shade company, which engulfs Michael at the wedding could be seen to foreshadow that there is only one route in Michael’s future. Either way, one thing is for certain – Michael’s presentation as honourable and virtuous will make his eventual transformation all the more tragic and, by extension, all the more striking, in order to convey that even this symbol of morality can be broken.

Towards the middle of the film, a scene in Joey’s diner begins Michael’s journey of change, chaining him to his budding immorality. Earlier in the narrative, Don Vito Corleone neglects to indulge in the illegal drug trade, dubbing it too “dirty”. As a result, he is shot and severely wounded by Sollozzo a member of another crime family. In the restaurant scene, Michael is presented with a significant decision – whether or not to kill Sollozzo and the corrupt police chief and authoritarian figure, McCluskey, who is facilitating the illegal drug trade. At the beginning of the scene, Coppola foreshadows Michael’s decision through costume. The director adorns Michael in a black suit, representing his connection to the mafia side of the family. He retrieves the handgun from the bathroom. When he returns, Coppola uses the diegetic sound of a passing train’s brakes and a slow zoom on Michael’s contemplating face to build tension before the decision. The train is a universal symbol of a journey. Thus, Coppola could be hinting at Michael’s choice ie will he get on the train, kill the two figures and begin his journey to corruption, or let the opportunity pass. The tension culminates in the shooting and killing of Sollozzo and McCluskey, cementing Michael’s imminent moral decline. The value of this scene comes from Coppola’s ability to present that, under the right circumstances, anyone can succumb to moral corruption, even Michael Corleone, the “nice college boy” and “war hero”. What’s more, the director illustrates that immorality is subjective, it’s not black and white. The audience still supports Michael, as the decision was his only option to protect his vulnerable, hospitalised father and, by extension, the family. By furthering Michael’s individual immorality, Coppola captures humanities universal potential to fall to corruption.

The baptism scene, at the end of the film, represents the completion of Michael’s journey to absolute moral decline. His sister Connie and her husband Carlo’s decision to have Michael be the Godfather of their child is indicative of Michael’s transformation. Coppola’s fantastic editing allows him to smoothly transition between the innocence of the baby’s christening and the corrupt vulgarity of the corporate crime world. For example, he uses a match cut of the unveiling of the child, wrapped in fabric, and the unveiling of an automatic machine gun, affectively contrasting this innocence and corruption. To support this Coppola emerges the crescendo of the organ music with the priest asking Michael “Do you renounce evil”, to which Michael replies “Yes” against silence. At this cue, the organ beings its decrescendo at the same time that Michael’s carefully orchestrated plan to murder the heads of all families is undertaken. Before the men are systematically slaughtered, along side harmless, and uninvolved individuals, Michael lies, directly, in the house of God, cementing his decline and damning his soul. Initially, Coppola romanticised the gangster/mafia family, to the extent to which they could be seen as an alternative to government. They embodied honesty, respect and loyalty to family, unlike the Nixon administration. Nixon promised and campaigned to end the Vietnam War. Instead, he exacerbated it, even bombing 500,000 neutral Cambodians in “operation menu”. The Watergate scandal also followed the premiere of the film. In this scene, however, Coppola portrays the criminality of the Mafia. Somewhere along the way, Michael’s killing become about furthering himself. Not protecting the family, but becoming this all-powerful figure, “The Godfather”. In this sense, the zeitgeist of the 1970s was ripe for a film that showed the effects of power on moral corruption. Michael’s tragic journey facilitated the comparison of the films theme to then American government, and power corruption in general.           

To conclude, Francis Ford Coppola cleverly illustrates the universal idea that anyone can succumb to moral corruption under the right circumstances. Michael’s tragic decline, facilitated by a desire to protect his family, then, ultimately, to further himself allowed this theme to be explored and addressed. With brilliant use of cinematography, costume and other various verbal and visual techniques, Coppola used the issues of one individual to address an issue of universal significance. Ultimately, the director makes us ponder that perhaps it’s not our morality that makes us human, but our universal potential for hedonism and corruption that truly epitomises the human condition.