I can't remember whether I've written about motivation before, but it's a topic I keep coming back to because I think any work of fiction or even nonfiction depends on whether the character is sufficiently motivated to do the things the author has the character do. In other words, why does the character do what he or she does? When I think of character motivation, I actually think of a series of movies rather than novels. To me The Godfather, both I and II, are great movies despite their having a level of violence that I normally wouldn't watch. What makes the movies great is Coppola’s exploration of evil and how one decision can move someone from being basically good to being fundamentally evil.
The problem with both of the first two movies is that Coppola wants to make a movie about evil and the struggle of people as they deal with its impact while using the movie as a vehicle for his economic views: he wants to overlay that movie and have as its driving force a condemnation of capitalism, which is politics (not sure how he feels about that issue now that he’s gotten so very rich off these films).
In the first movie and the pulp novel, Michael is determined not to be involved in his family's business, which is, of course, the Mafia. The most important moment in the movie is when Michael makes the decision to murder a man for the first time to protect his father, who has been shot by a rival don protected by a corrupt police captain. Although many of us might say we would kill for our families, Michael’s movement from nice college boy/war hero to being a “made man” is a weak moment because Michael shows an insufficient internal struggle, present in the novel as well. It’s true that as the son of a Don, he has grown up surrounded by violence. Nevertheless and despite his father’s being shot, it seems to me that we should see a greater internal struggle, a longer struggle, a darker struggle, as Michael takes a step from which he cannot return. The brilliance of the movie—the fact that once he has stepped over a particular line, he cannot go back and be who he was because stepping over the line separating good from evil has changed him irrevocably—is somewhat marred by a missed opportunity to play out that internal struggle more fully.
So in the first movie, you have a moment in the film that should have been profound but wasn't necessarily. In the second movie, you see Coppola trying to impose what he wants the movie to be about onto Michael.
Michael has two beliefs on which he basis all of his decisions: protect the family and base decisions on pure logic. All of his decisions in the book and the movie stem from those two driving forces. In the second movie, Freddie, Michael's brother, betrays Michael and almost gets Michael's wife and children murdered in their bedroom in an appalling act of violence that terrifies both Michael and the audience. As the movie goes on, Michael becomes wealthier and more successful, more powerful until at last he becomes untouchable. The process of murdering others in retaliation and self-defense, his need to protect his family, the fortress they’re forced to live in—the life he builds as a result of that one fateful decision to kill a man—forces him to become his father times ten: ruthless and emotionally remote from his family.
Nevertheless, Michael lives according to his two rules; he defends his family and is always logical. When Coppola has Michael kill his brother Freddie and all of his living enemies despite the danger it brings to the organization, Coppola has him act outside of the parameters of his character. One thing that really bothered me during the movie is Coppola’s insistence, conveyed through characters such as Michael’s sister, on Freddie’s innocence, yet we see that he's not innocent. He betrayed his family. The tension between what the characters are saying about Freddie and what the audience thinks of Freddie based on his own actions mars the movie. Given the context, Michael was justified in having Freddie killed. To eliminate the tension, Coppola needed to stop having other characters defend Freddie and concede that justice was served by his death or have Michael forgive him with the clear intention of showing that Michael’s forgiveness was an act of mercy and not what Freddie deserved.
Coppola’s having Michael irrationally killing all of his enemies, who were already incapacitated, is also a flaw as once again Coppola has to have Michael step outside the parameters of his character as one governed by logic. Apparently, Coppola wanted the audience to see Michael as the ultimate capitalist, twisted and murderous. Instead he showed that even in a great movie, you can have serious problems with motivation, often but not always as result of the author, or in this case, director, trying to impose his or her will on a character. Even Mario Puzo, the author of the novel, didn’t want Michael to kill Freddie and said he would only put it in the script if Michael waited until his mother died.
Once an author creates a character, the character takes on a life of its own, and the author must live within the parameters by which the character operates and in which the character lives.
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