Part III Reassessed¶
Your sins are terrible, and it is just that you suffer. Your life could be redeemed, but I know you don't believe that. You will not change. Cardinal Lamberto to Michael Corleone
The case for the defense. Not that Part III is as good as the first two — it isn't — but that the gap between its quality and its reputation is one of the widest in American film.
What the reputation is¶
That it's a disaster; that Sofia Coppola ruined it; that it's a cash-grab; that it retroactively damages the trilogy.
Some of this comes from the reviews, but most of it comes from thirty-five years of repetition by people who haven't watched it. The film has become a shorthand — the thing you compare a bad third installment to — and shorthands don't get re-examined.
What the record actually says¶
The contemporary reception was mixed, not hostile:
- 67% on Rotten Tomatoes — not a good score, and not a catastrophe. It's the same neighborhood as plenty of respectable films.
- 60 on Metacritic. B+ CinemaScore from audiences.
- Roger Ebert: 3½ / 4. He defended it, defended Sofia Coppola specifically, and argued it isn't even possible to understand the film without the first two.
- Gene Siskel put it tenth on his 1990 ten-best list.
- Leonard Maltin: 3 / 4 — masterfully told, with an almost-fatal flaw.
- Vincent Canby, who had panned Part II in 1974, was warm about this one.
- Seven Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director.
- $136.9 million worldwide on a $54 million budget, with a Christmas Day record that stood for seven years until Titanic.
A film that everyone remembers as a flop was a solid commercial performer with a Best Picture nomination and a top-ten placement from one of America's two most-read critics.
Then in 2020 the Coda recut — the same footage, four minutes shorter, resequenced at both ends — scored 86% and 76. A nineteen- and sixteen-point jump for a film with essentially the same content in it.
The honest list of what's wrong¶
Not a defense worth having if it won't concede the problems:
The Immobiliare plot is inert. A film about a man's soul cannot afford a second act about shareholding, and the Vatican Bank material is genuinely hard to follow on a first viewing. Coda helps — moving the Gilday meeting to the front states the business plainly — but doesn't fix it.
Tom Hagen's absence is a structural wound. A film about a man seeking absolution needs someone who tells him the truth, and Part III has to invent substitutes for a function Hagen was built to serve. Connie absorbs most of it, which turns her competent in a way the earlier films don't quite set up. This is a money problem, not a story problem — see Duvall.
Sofia Coppola cannot carry the ending. She's a non-actor among Actors Studio veterans, and the tonal mismatch is real and unmissable.
Pacino is playing sixty at fifty, and occasionally acting the makeup.
It explains itself. The first two films never once told you what they meant. This one keeps telling you.
What it does that the others can't¶
It takes damnation seriously as a religious question.
The first two films are moral: Michael does terrible things and becomes a terrible person. Part III is theological: Michael has done terrible things, and the question is whether the universe has any mechanism for that to be lifted, and the answer is yes, and it will make no difference.
The confession scene with Cardinal Lamberto is the best thing in the film and among the best things Pacino has ever done. A man who has not said a fully true sentence in thirty years says one — I killed my mother's son. I killed my father's son — and breaks apart doing it. Lamberto absolves him and tells him he will not change.
And he doesn't. He is absolved and he is not redeemed. That's an austere, entirely orthodox theological position, and no other American crime film of comparable stature has attempted it. See Catholicism & Ritual.
The opera finale answers the baptism.
The 1972 baptism sequence intercuts a sacrament with five murders and Michael comes out of it as Don. Eighteen years later, Part III runs the identical construction — one continuous piece of music (Mascagni), multiple locations, a Corleone standing still in the middle — and Michael comes out of it holding his dead daughter.
The first sequence deferred a bill. The second presents it. That rhyme is completely earned and it requires the third film to exist.
The silent scream.
Michael on the steps with Mary, and Coppola cuts the sound. Three or four seconds of the widest gesture in the trilogy playing in total silence before the audio returns.
It is the best shot in the film and one of the best in the series. The first film ended by closing a door on a woman; this ends by closing the audience out of a sound. Both are refusals of access, and this one is worse because there's nothing left inside.
Vincent is a genuinely good idea. The succession problem is solved by the arrival of Sonny come back — brave, loyal, fearless, no judgment. Michael educating him is the film's most interesting relationship, because both men know it didn't work the first time. Andy García got the film's only acting nomination and earned it.
The thesis holds. Michael spends the film buying his way into a legitimate world that turns out to be dirtier than the one he came from. Zasa is a thug and looks like one. Gilday takes the money and murders a Pope. That is the logical destination of everything Themes describes, and it required a third film to say.
On the treatment of Sofia Coppola¶
This deserves separating from the aesthetic question.
The performance isn't good. What followed was two Razzies, a decade as the standing punchline for the film's failure, and a level of press hostility directed at an 18-year-old who had been drafted in an emergency after four other actresses fell through — one of whom had been murdered.
Ebert defended her at the time, arguing a polished professional would have brought a slickness the part is better off without. Her father has said the critics used his daughter to attack him and has noted the irony that a film about a man whose child pays for his sins produced exactly that in life.
She stopped acting, directed The Virgin Suicides, then won the Academy Award for writing Lost in Translation and became the first American woman nominated for Best Director.
The film's weakest element and its worst-treated participant are the same person, and those two facts are not the same fact.
What to do about it¶
Watch Coda. It is Coppola's preferred version, it's better shaped, and the reordering genuinely changes what the film is about. If you've only seen the 1990 cut, you have seen the worse of two available films.
Watch it as an epilogue, not a third act. David Ehrlich's reading of Coda is the useful one: the postscript to a legendary pair rather than the third leg of a flawed trilogy. Judged as The Godfather Part III, it fails a comparison nothing could survive. Judged as The Death of Michael Corleone — the title Coppola and Puzo wanted and Paramount refused — it is a sad, serious, uneven film about whether a man can be forgiven.
The answer it gives is: yes, and it won't help.