The Godfather does NOT hold up as a great movie.
It's good on the technical aspects and performances are OK (Brando's actually pretty hokey, with his nuanced ticks feeling more like something to cover up the fact that he didn't memorize his lines), but the narrative lacks solid emotional connection and good character development - the movie is all plot. Yes, there's the "story" of the business being handed down the family and trying to prevent an all-out mafia war, but the relationships between the characters are poorly, if at all, developed. Vito and Michael's relationship is weak and Tom Hagen barely feels like a brother; the entire family dynamic is strange. Not to mention the time jumps detract from narrative - it should have been more contained to help stress the development, particularly for Michael's descent. Also, the women in the movie are given "damsel" roles.
When is there ever good banter to show the relationships? It's a weak "family" movie.
Game of Thrones is what The Godfather wishes is could be. While The Godfather obviously paved the way for a lot of things in modern cinema (whether film or TV), it unfortunately doesn't hold up from a storytelling perspective.
Admittedly, I'm not a drama guy. It's very hard for me to enjoy a movie that's pure drama or always serious. My biggest issue is the film grossly lacked humor and comedy (humor doesn’t mean slapstick, it can be dramatic). To me, comedy is truth, comedy is life. If I don’t find humor in something, it rings hollow.
The Godfather is always serious.
Again, humor doesn’t always have to be about a “joke” or slapstick. Humor can be simply relating to something or a character having an honest reaction. There are maybe a handful of moments that actually felt human to me:
1. “Take the cannoli”
2. Sonny coming to the aid of his sister
3. Apollonia driving in the car
4. Tessio asking to be spared (specifically Tessio, not so much Tom)
Nearly all other moments in the film are serious, as there’s very little brevity or banter between the characters and ESPECIALLY no humor, which is very strange for an Italian family, as Italians are probably the best example of running the full gamut of emotions (or at least the anger to happy spectrum). Granted, this may be an aspect of Italians of the 40s, as Joseph pointed out, whereas I'm familiar with modern Italians, actually being one.
Let's address the two main characters, Vito and Michael Corleone. For their arcs and emotions, here’s what I saw:
Michael Corleone, as played by Al Pacino, has the arc of being the good boy of the family, who wasn’t supposed to get involved in the family business, actually getting involved and ascending into power while descending his humanity. He debuts in the wedding scene and starts at about an ambivalent/neutral 5 on the emotion spectrum, where 10 is manic Robin Williams and 1 is angry Pacino.
At no point do we really see Michael as the happy guy away from the family business. Sure, he’s a war hero, which assuredly changes him so he probably won’t be as happy-go-lucky, but at no point in the movie does it ever feel like he’s not in the business. As well, if his arc is about his descent/loss of humanity and his big turning point is the restaurant assassination as his means of getting involved, the setup prior to the moment wasn’t enough to justify his turn (again, he’s always been present in the film and with the family to that point). They tried to show his humanity and confliction of the assassination by closing up on his eyes/face, showing his eyes darting around, but his arc to that point wasn’t strong enough to justify his nervousness. Also, what did he do in the war? Did he kill anyone? If so, why is he so nervous now?
From there, he descends on the emotion spectrum to a 4, possibly a 3, as he moves to Italy to avoid the fallout. He sees a girl that he “falls in love with” which equates to staring intently. Staring. Intently. She comes across more like a possession he needs than someone he’s falling in love with. The whole point of his time in Italy is to further the idea of keeping him out of the business by establishing him falling in love, so that when Appollonia is assassinated he further descends down the spectrum, he comes back to America for vengeance.
Back in America and rising to power, Michael is at a 3 or 2 on the emotion spectrum. He’s more aggressive, conniving and ruthless. He’s asserting his power by re-organizing the family, as the family has been falling apart over time. By the culmination of the baptism-assassination, he’s taken control as the new Godfather, where he’s at a solid 2 on the emotion scale. During his last scene with Diane Keaton, he has a flash of 1 as he briefly pulls out angry Pacino. You can see in his eyes that he’s pretty gone and lost his humanity.
The big problem with Michael, for me, is that nowhere during that spectrum or arc do I care for him. At no point has he ever shown any humanity worth attaching to:
1. He has no real love for Diane Keaton
2. He has no innocence as he was never actually away from the family business
3. He has no real love for Appollonia
Why should I care about Michael besides the fact that he’s the main character? He’s not a badass rising to power like Scarface. For someone going through horrible events, he’s not nearly as relatable or has as wide an emotional range of, say, Chiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years a Slave, who starts at a happy 8 and descends to a darker place (a 3, maybe a 2), only to come back to a happier side by the end, but clearly still an affected person.
As for Vito and Brando, he starts the film on the serious side, around a 3, and pretty much hovers there for most of the movie (getting closer to a 5 or 6 towards his end, after he’s dethroned). He’s serious and trying to do business. He’s shown only focusing on business. He never talks about family or anything human, it’s just business, business, business, nothing personal. Then again, perhaps Vito was never about family and it's a false assumption on my part, as I don't recall him interacting in his daughter’s wedding much and barely ever with his wife. His personal side doesn’t come out until the end, when he becomes the “old grandpa.”
Because of that, Vito’s big emotional reveal of not wanting Michael to not be in the business falls completely flat – it was barely ever established. It was a falsely emotional scene. They never had heart to heart conversations, it was rarely established that Vito didn’t want Michael involved. Michael was pretty much always present.
Now, if that is the point of Vito’s story arc, in which he’s a guy who never had control of his family despite having control of basically an entire city, then that seems like a bit of a stretch. Half of his family is working with him, how hard would it be to check on his wife, daughter and “favorite” son? I find it hard to believe a guy that powerful wouldn’t be checking in on his own family and people. Speaking of which, his daughter is a complete farce as a character – by no means does she seem like either a mob daughter’s boss or an Italian woman. Italian women are strong as hell. She’s a princess/damsel. She is a plot device.
Speaking of which, the way the story presents itself, the characters rarely felt like they had any agency. Every character largely felt like they were going through the motions of the writer/screenwriter, rather than having things organically happen to them. The writing came across as putting the characters through these scenarios in order to make me FEEL, but the pacing and flow didn’t match. There was little character pathos, just manipulation.
