The Godfather: the Coppola Restoration (DVD Review)

The New York Times

‘THE GODFATHER: THE COPPOLA RESTORATION’

By DAVE KEHR

Many of Francis Ford Coppola’s films, including the recent “Youth Without Youth,” have been haunted by the passing of time and an acute awareness of its destructive handiwork — the sense that once a treasured moment has been lost, nothing can be done to recover it.

But now a piece of Mr. Coppola’s own youth, which also happens to be one of the greatest works in American film, has been recovered, and spectacularly so. On Tuesday Paramount Home Entertainment is issuing the three films that make up Mr. Coppola’s “Godfather” saga, miraculously rejuvenated by a team of digital restoration experts under the supervision of the film preservationist Robert A. Harris. Offered both in high-definition Blu-ray and standard DVD editions, Mr. Coppola’s three films seem to have reclaimed the golden glow of their original theatrical screenings — a glow that has been dimmed and all but extinguished over the years through a series of disappointing home video editions.

Most of Mr. Harris’s work has gone into the first (1972) and second (1974) films in the trilogy. The later and less well-received third installment (1990) did not need as much effort, having been shot on a newer generation of film stock and never subjected to the abuse that nearly destroyed Parts I and II. By all accounts, the original negatives of the first two films were so torn up and dirty that they could no longer be run through standard film laboratory printing equipment, and so the only option became a digital, rather than a photochemical, restoration.

The final product, which the studio is calling “The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration,” combines bits and pieces of film recovered from innumerable sources, scanned at high resolution and then retouched frame by frame to remove dirt and scratches. The color was brought back to its original values by comparing it with first-generation release prints and by extensive consultation with Gordon Willis, who shot all three films, and Allen Daviau, a cinematographer (“E.T.”) who is also a leading historian of photographic technology.

The tight grain of the image, so important a component of Mr. Willis’s original low-light photography, has returned to particularly spectacular effect in the four-disc Blu-ray edition. The effect is not unlike that of a pristine 35-millimeter print projected in perfect focus — a rare enough phenomenon in a movie theater and, until quite recently, inconceivable in the living room.

The “Godfather” films remain the 20th-century answer to Shakespeare’s plays of royal succession, with the twist that here Prince Hal grows up, not into Henry V, but Richard III. Al Pacino’s performance as Michael Corleone, the introverted youngest son of a wise and ruthless monarch, remains a model of modulation. The shape of his face, the set of his eyes, the weight of his body all seem to evolve imperceptibly (at least until the aggressive intervention of makeup in Part III). A puppyish kid who might have been played by Dustin Hoffman in his “Graduate” period becomes a figure of immense gravity and chilling emotional reserve, a portrait worthy of Walter Huston or Max von Sydow.

Watching the first film, you are struck again by how little screen time Marlon Brando actually occupies. Most of his work is done in the 20-minute opening sequence, as the Godfather sits in his study, receiving supplicants on the day of his daughter’s wedding. This is a piece of superbly efficient expository writing, setting out an exotic milieu, describing its rules and moral configuration, and establishing the larger-than-life figure who presides over and protects it.

And Brando plays it like the master he was, balancing just enough exaggeration (the cotton-stuffed cheeks, the asthmatic voice) with pure behavioral naturalism (the eyes that go blank when he is bored or distracted) to create a figure that both belongs to this world and is too big for it. After that sequence his work is effectively done, and the character can recede into the background of the action (he spends much of the rest of the movie recovering from an assassination attempt) without surrendering his dominant presence.

Like another venerated American epic, “Gone With the Wind,” the first “Godfather” film is essentially a study in vanishing feudalism: the old, aristocratic masters who made their empires out of sweat and blood are fading into the background, to be replaced by the middle-class, mercantile interests represented in “Gone With the Wind” by the blockade runner Rhett Butler and in the first “Godfather” by the drug-dealing upstart Sollozzo (Al Lettieri).

Part II takes place in a more modern world, where capitalism is king, and it is difficult to tell where gangsterism leaves off, and normal business procedures begin. The action shifts to a global scale, as the Corleones conquer Nevada and, very nearly, Cuba — and Mr. Coppola rises to the occasion with a sense of physical scale and epic conflict that no amount of computer-generated-imagery enhancement has yet been able to reproduce.

At the center of it all, of course, remains the family drama. In an increasingly rootless country American audiences envied the Corleones for their powerful sense of ethnic and family identity, the privilege of belonging to an extended, self-reliant and self-protecting group. At the same time the family itself is a constant source of anguish, shot through by betrayals, suspicions and carefully erected barriers. (Who can forget the doors that slowly close on Diane Keaton’s Kay at the climaxes of Parts I and II?) Michael can protect his family only by destroying it.

Eighteen years after the sting of disappointment has passed, Part III no longer seems the total disaster it once did, but the grandeur of the first two films has slipped irretrievably away. By this point in his career, Mr. Pacino had become a very different actor, trading stealth and retention for actorly tricks: the staggering old man’s gait; the sudden explosions of vein-popping rage. The intrigue is now international (the plot draws on the scandals surrounding the Vatican bank at the time) but seems somehow smaller than what has come before, more of a screenwriter’s conceit than a peek behind the curtain of power.

But as Michael becomes weaker, his baby sister, Connie, whose wedding opened the first film, has evolved into a figure out of Greek tragedy or Italian opera: a Medea or a Medici. Played by Talia Shire, Mr. Coppola’s sister, Connie seems to possess the calm, dark resolve that has abandoned her increasingly sentimental brother: a Godmother who almost seems capable of carrying the plot dynamics to a fourth, more satisfying final installment. (Paramount Home Entertainment, Blu-ray, $124.99; standard definition, $69.99; R.)