The Godfather trilogy is probably best summarized by a line that Michael Corleone delivers early in the first movie. Sitting with his girlfriend Kay at his sister's wedding, he tells her a story from his family's past. Seeing Kay's reaction to the violent story, Michael says, "That's my family, Kay. It's not me." The line barely registers, but it is actually profound; these words set the tragic tone for the story that follows and the two subsequent films. The Godfather is where we see Michael transformed, not caught up in a chain of events, but making a choice against-the-grain of everything he's done up to that point in his life. Later in the movie, his father, Don Corleone, explains that he wanted Michael to rise above the crime family and become that hand holding the marionette's strings. Watching Don Corleone and his son traverse their respective paths (decline and ascendancy) is fascinating, but even more masterful is the depiction of the characters around them. Rather than just a single tragic character or two, The Godfather brings the traditionally neutral chorus into the action. Characters like Sonny and Kay, along with third-stringers like Luca Brasi and Tessio, are compelled to do the things they do, regardless of consequence. Confronted with Michael's unexplained absence, Kay still takes him back, so is it any wonder that she'll be happy to believe what she wants to believe about his involvement with Carlo's death? The plot-line around Sonny's death even has the bad guys set him up in a way that capitalizes on what they know he'll do in a burst of hot temper. As much predestination as there may be underneath the film, The Godfather is entertaining, exciting, and still sometimes shocking so many years later.
Following a movie as powerful as The Godfather would seem almost impossible, but the vision was successfully carried beyond Puzo's original epic novel. This sequel is more like what George Lucas did with the ongoing Star Wars saga, in that Lucas was making it up as he went along. Perhaps every author imagines more about his characters than can fit in one space, making for good sequels, so long as the author's imagination fits with our notion about where the characters should/could/would go. Puzo and Coppola did work together on the two movies that followed The Godfather, so there's a wonderful continuity between all the films. It would be tempting to see The Godfather Part II as the film where Michael replaces his father, but it isn't. Michael has symbolically replaced his father by the end of The Godfather, but it takes him the entire sequel to really become Don Corleone. Beyond the struggles we see Michael face during The Godfather Part II, there is the flashback to Don Corleone's life as a young man. Brando's character from the first film is played in what would be an Oscar-winning performance by Robert Deniro. With Deniro as the young Don, we have a sort of specter of Brando's character from The Godfather filling the screen, preventing us from really buying Michael as completely ascendant. The family dynamics that played through The Godfather continue here, building to what will be a fever pitch by The Godfather Part III.
The Godfather Part III is the movie that many of the people reading this review may have started with. It comes back in many ways full circle, with Pacino now fully established in the mold that Brando set so many decades before him. The Brando Don, both succeeding and failing in a subdued, restrained way, is hardly how Pacino operated in The Godfather Part II. Michael Corleone has learned enough the hard way to realize that maintaining the balance between heart, mind, and soul is almost impossible in the traditional mafia vein. After fighting through The Godfather Part II for legitimacy, he attains the kind his father could only dream of. Remember that it was Michael's part in the vendetta against the other crime families that broke his father's heart, since the Don assumed Michael would be forever barred from holding true power. Forever is a long time, and The Godfather Part II demonstrates that Michael is capable of mastering a new world, a world for which his father was unprepared. The part that Michael's father understood was family, and The Godfather Part III is Michael's final lesson, a long, slow tragedy of the type that played out in The Godfather, the difference being that there is no hope and possibility for transference at the end of the film. The mold that was cast by Michael's act against his family in The Godfather (going to the Dark Side?) has marked him, and the final turn of events is Tragedy in its most literal sense.
Each film contains several language options and English output in 5.1 Surround or Mono. A commentary track is available with Coppola reminiscing about everything from actor selection, to filming on location, to his struggles with the studio as he attempted to make the movie he wanted to make. The idea of watching three hours of movie again with commentary is what will separate the fans from the devotees, but hearing Coppola talk through these films is like attending a class on them. Better than a class, because you'll never find anyone more well versed in this material than Coppola. There are two additional DVDs in The Coppola Restoration with material collated from previous collections and releases. One disk contains all new material while the other is re-released content. Favorites for fans and devotees will be a "Making of" featurette and backstory material on the film's music and production through two featurettes, "The Music of The Godfather" and "The Masterpiece That Almost Wasn't." A featurette on the restoration work done to produce this collection might not seem like the most engaging, but actually turns out to be a fascinating look at the magic required to make that "movie magic" we all know when we see it. A Corleone family tree, original trailers, snippets from shows where Academy awards were presented to Coppola, storyboards, interviews on any subject imaginable related to the film... It's a huge stew of features that comes packaged with The Coppola Restoration, our only gripe being that the bonus disks were mislabelled according to their contents. The content is there, just on different disks, so no big deal.
This collection is nothing short of miraculous. To fully elaborate on the content of The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration and its significance would require another few pages. Coppola had such a passion for this material, and fans of the three movies have expressed a similar passion and dedication over the years to watching every new iteration of The Godfather trilogy, probably in the hope of understanding how these films have the power they do to create such strong emotional reactions. The Coppola Restoration will be the definitive collection, until some new medium is created that would allow Coppola to appear as a virtual personage next to us on the couch and answer our questions about the movies as we watch... Until then, even mild fans of The Godfather should grab this collection and prepare to be thrilled, all over again.
