The Upright Man
There is a cat in the first scene, and this is the detail I cannot get past. A man is describing the rape of his daughter — the courtroom, the suspended sentence, the humiliation of an American promise revoked — and the man he is describing it to is stroking a stray that has wandered onto the set and into film history, its grey head pushing against a knuckle heavy with wedding-day formality. The shutters are drawn against a wedding. Somewhere outside, in a light so overexposed it looks like memory, a girl in white is being handed around a dance floor. Inside, in the amber gloom, Don Vito Corleone listens to Bonasera the undertaker with the patience of a man hearing a story he has heard four hundred times and intends to hear properly anyway, and his hand goes on moving over the animal's spine, and the whole moral universe of the film is established in that gesture before a single shot is fired.
Cinema returns compulsively to a certain kind of man, and Brando's Vito is the most complete portrait we have of him: the man who knows wretchedness. Not as doctrine, not as a subject for the pulpit, not as something that befalls the unlucky in neighbourhoods one drives through with the windows up — but as a country. He has lived there. He has learned its dialect, done business in its back rooms, buried people in its soil and had people he loved buried in it. And still he stands upright, in the peculiar way of men who have carried something heavy for so long that the carrying has become their posture. He does not moralize. He does not offer you the fiction of clean hands. He simply knows, and the knowing has weight, and he never once sets it down.
To see what Coppola and Brando are doing, one must draw a line between two ways of speaking about human brokenness, and the line is not between good men and bad ones but between altitudes.
There is the priest's way, which speaks from doctrine and from a certain height — a height that is not always arrogance, sometimes merely vocation, but a height nonetheless. It divides the fallen from the redeemed. It has judgement for one and absolution for the other, and it cannot help implying, however tenderly, however sincerely, a them and an us. And then there is the Don's way, which speaks from inside the machinery, having been oiled by it and cut on it. It has handled wretchedness, endured it, and — this is the part the admiring viewer would prefer to skip — inflicted it. It has no use whatever for the vocabulary of moral superiority, not out of humility but out of information. When Vito hears a man's grievance in that shadowed office, he is not weighing the man against an ideal. He is recognizing him. The two verbs are not neighbours.
This is what Brando reached for, and it is why the performance survives its own myth. Another actor would have given us menace; another, paternal warmth; another, the shrewdness of the boardroom, which is menace with better tailoring. Brando gives us a man who knows, and the knowledge is not theoretical, and it is not comfortable, and it has cost him. He plays a mouth full of consequence. Everything is slowed — the voice sanded down to a whisper you must lean toward, the head turning a half-second late, as though thought were a physical object that must be lifted. Great screen acting is often just this: the visible labour of carrying.
His gravity comes from holding three truths at once and refusing to let any of them cancel the others, which is precisely the trick most of us cannot manage before lunch.
He carries wretchedness. He has killed and ordered killings. He has bought judges and bent men's lives to his purposes and made of a police captain a line item. He has done the things that corrode a soul by any honest accounting, and he is not confused about this; there is no scene in which he explains it away.
He carries dignity, which is the harder of the two to act. He speaks softly and listens with his whole face. He remembers the small courtesies, the name of the baker's boy, the shape of a favour owed. He shelters what comes under his wing. He is capable of tenderness and of fairness within his own code — that limited, sincere, self-serving code — and of a loyalty that costs him money and men.
And he carries knowledge: of what the world does to a person, because it did all of it to him and he did much of it back. He knows that good and evil are not two boxes with a lid apiece but threads braided so tightly through a single life that pulling one unravels the other.
Because he holds all three, he has no need to look down at anyone, and so his moral gaze runs horizontally. What you have done is a rearrangement of possibilities I also carry; I expressed mine differently, earlier, with different tools and worse options. This is an equality felt from below rather than announced from above, and it is the only kind that has ever convinced anybody.
Observe, too, that men like Vito do not rise by escaping the wretched world. They rise by mastering its logic, which is an entirely different achievement and carries an entirely different bill. The order he builds is, in his own mind, a protective order — a roof over people to whom the country of their arrival offered no roof at all — and it is powerful precisely because it is native to the disease it treats. Which is why he can sit at the summit of his hierarchy and speak to an undertaker, a baker, a spoiled singer with a ruined voice, without a grain of condescension. He has money, status, men who will drive somewhere at three in the morning and not ask why. But he has not forgotten the gutter, because he knows that the gutter and the throne are joined by a shorter road than respectable people find it convenient to admit. Respectability, he seems to understand, is usually a luxury purchased with someone else's dirt, at a discount, in cash.
And here the film turns its knife, slowly, the way it does everything.
A man may learn to bear wretchedness with grace. He may shoulder it consciously and decline to pass it on as cruelty, may refuse to inflict it casually or for sport. But the shield he has raised over his family is itself forged out of the thing he understands, and a shield made of that material has an edge, and children are careless with edges. Sonny is destroyed by the world his father mastered, at a tollbooth, in the open, spectacularly, as he did everything. Michael — the clean one, the son held deliberately outside, the war hero with the college diction and the American girlfriend — is drawn down by inches and hollowed out with such patience that we do not notice the moment he becomes uninhabitable. By the trilogy's end his suffering is nearly unwatchable, and not because he chose evil freely; he inherited a structure his father built out of love and necessity, and could not, at any of the several moments he genuinely tried, step outside of it. There is a scene late in the story in which a man who has spent his life protecting his family stands on the steps of an opera house and opens his mouth and no sound comes out. This is the bill, arriving.
For a man like Vito, then, wretchedness stops being a private feeling and becomes something closer to a physical law. Power always costs innocence. Protection always carries a hidden invoice, payable later, by someone smaller. What you did to survive will mark your children even if you take exquisite care to hide the details from them — perhaps especially then, since the hidden thing is the one they inherit without instructions.
So he does not moralize, and now we can say why. He knows his own hands. He knows that condemning another man too briskly would also condemn the younger version of himself, the one with fewer choices and no money and a language he could barely hold. When he addresses someone who has done something terrible he neither absolves nor damns: You did this. There is a price. You are not uniquely monstrous — you did what a great many would do standing where you stood. You have some choices left, though they are smaller now. Which is not forgiveness in the priestly sense, and is something rarer and, in its cold way, more humane: the refusal to pretend that any of us belong to a different species from the ones we are judging.
True egalitarianism, in the sense this film keeps reaching toward and never announces, is not the cheerful proposition that everyone is equally good. It is the far less flattering recognition that everyone is equally vulnerable to wretchedness, equally capable of ugliness and of grace under sufficient pressure, and that nobody — not the addict, not the priest, not the Don, not the person in the dark holding the popcorn — can say honestly, I could never have become that. The man who has understood this can look at the addict and the prostitute and the beaten-down clerk and the corporate shark and see variations on one pattern. He may still demand payment. He may still enforce his rules, and enforce them in blood. But he does not lie about what people are, or about what the world is capable of doing to them, and in a century of films that lie constantly and charmingly about both, this is nearly a moral position.
That is the atmosphere of The Godfather: not innocence, not cynicism, but an unsentimental compassion that has earned the right to open its mouth.
Brando lowers his voice and does the thing almost no screen performance attempts. He plays a man who has overcome wretchedness without once pretending to be free of it, and who knows — with a clarity that never resolves into speech, only into slowness — that the cost of his rising will be paid by the children he loves, in a currency he cannot spend on their behalf. The film does not ask us to admire him. It asks us to recognize him, and in recognizing him to notice the same braided thread running through ourselves, which is why people who have never been near a crime keep watching it.
That is what cinema can do at its best. Not preach the difference between the fallen and the righteous, but quietly dissolve it, and let us sit for a few hours in the company of a man who already knew — stroking a cat, in a dark room, while outside the light is unbearable and someone's daughter is getting married.