The Godfather has provoked so much nostalgia that it is easy to forget or overlook the fact that Michael Corleone’s recitation of the “offer he can’t refuse” story is met with horrified disgust from his girlfriend. “That’s my family, Kay, not me,” he insists.
By the end of the film, the differences between Michael and his family are slightly less clear. His slow descent into damnation is one of cinema’s most heart-rendering depictions of a man losing his way. No one wakes up one morning and says, “I think I will go to hell today.” The wide path is filled with small compromises, each with its own justifications and excuses, each hardening the heart a little more. until the monster we have become would not be recognizable to the man we used to be.
If Michael’s deterioration is the story arc that drives The Godfather, his rationalizations are the fuel that allows him (and some viewers) to turn a blind eye to his ever-more-precarious moral standing. Michael tries valiantly, as we all do, to euphemize the immoral, to create a new lexicon for sin, a new category for acts that are technically crimes but that he insists do not deserve punishment. “Where does it say you can’t kill a cop?” Michael asks the crime family that is still cowed by power invested legitimately even if brandished illegitimately. A “dishonest” cop. A “corrupt” cop. Matters of right and wrong, commandments, give way to stories that can or cannot be sold in the family-owned newspapers.
Micheal is Hamlet and Claudius rolled into one. And we may sympathize with the grieving son looking to avenge his beloved father — until he becomes the anguished murderer willing to do anything except surrender the fruits of his crime.
The Godfather seamlessly and brilliantly vacillates between our personal excuses for personal crimes and our corporate excuses for corporate crimes. The mafia justifies itself because the institutions of power that punish it are themselves corrupt. Its tribalism is the indignant, contemptuous response to any and all who would invoke America’s melting pot mythology while simultaneously hating those immigrants who want a full share of what they have been assimilated into.
The Gospel of Mark claims that a man who gives his soul for the acquisition of the entire world has made a poor exchange. Perhaps the most terrifying feature of The Godfather is that it can make that exchange look reasonable and honorable and right to those who have been taught all their lives that it is not.
And yet…perhaps there is a beauty and a truth in the film if we have eyes to see. Perhaps the first step in turning away from sin is resisting the temptation to clutch our pearls and self-righteously proclaim, “Thank God, I am not like that man, a sinner.” Maybe…just maybe…if we see ourselves in Michael, we will have taken a step toward admitting what we, but for the grace of God, are capable of doing should circumstances provide us the opportunity and our hardened hearts provide us the justification. — Kenneth R. Morefield (2024)
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