The Godfather (1972): Eitan's Take

Whenever characters in a movie or TV show go out to the movies -- and this happens in Seinfeld quite a bit -- they always end up seeing some vaguely anonymous, obviously fake popcorn flick. I watch these scenes and wonder: do they have all the same movies we have in real life? Or in this parallel universe, do they have a completely different history of cinema and thousands of movies that don't exist in our universe? What I'm getting at is this: we should consider ourselves privileged, maybe even humbled, that we live in a world where a film like The Godfather exists. Like Casablanca, this film is ingrained in our consciousness regardless of whether or not we've seen it; it's just who we are. We were all born to love this film, and watching it for the first or second, or in my case the fifth or sixth time, one gets the sense that the film satisfies some crazy, innate Platonic ideal -- we all have to discover it on our own, but it waits for us and reveals itself slowly, poetically, elegantly, until we can do nothing but acquiesce to its awesome power.

It's basically pointless to try to write something breezy and clever about The Godfather. So much ink has been spilled over it already, and by much more talented and insightful people -- not to mention the fact that every human who takes him or herself seriously has seen this film by now and has their own approach. Someone once said that batting against Sandy Koufax was like eating soup with a fork, and that's pretty much how I feel about tackling The Godfather in a critical way. Like any great art -- Shakespeare, Da Vinci, Mozart -- The Godfather is too epic, too perfect, too unassailably well-constructed to comment on and then feel good about myself in the morning. Maybe this is a cop-out, but I honestly can't start breaking this film apart into its constituent units and letting you know how much I love it. My admiration for and fear of this movie should be self-evident.

Most American films live in the shadow of this behemoth, and for good reasons. From the first lines -- a paean to immigrant values -- to the last -- a powerful passing of the torch to a first-generation American -- it is truly our nation's finest film. It's not my favorite, not by a long shot, but if there has ever been a better rendering of the 20th century American story on film, I definitely don't know about it.

10/10.