That revenge plays out in the elaborate, gripping final sequence at the opera, a counterpart to one of the most famous episodes from The Godfather, when a baptism is intercut with a series of murders. That first sequence was about Michael’s rise to power; now he suffers the consequences. While the family watches Tony on stage, Coppola weaves in scenes of Vincent’s crew settling scores. One shoots an enemy who plummets off a beautiful spiral staircase. Another murders a rival by stabbing the man’s own eyeglasses into his neck. At the opera, hitmen are after Michael, which leads to the shooting on the steps, and a bullet meant for him that kills Mary. For him there is no coming back from that, no possible way to forgive himself.
As the film ends, Coppola makes a brilliant editing choice. The original ending flashed ahead years to the elderly Michael, sitting alone in a gravelly yard as the camera closes in on a face still full of desolation and sadness. He falls to the ground, obviously dead. With a tiny cut, Coppola transforms the meaning of the scene. It now ends with the close-up of Michael’s face, still alive. Living with his guilt is his true death, a death of the soul and of hope. Coppola adds text at the end, which says: “When the Sicilians wish you ‘Cent’anni’… it means ‘for long life’… and a Sicilian never forgets.” Michael is doomed to a long life of remembering.
Godfather, Coda restores Coppola’s original darker vision, but one element creates a jolt even he couldn’t have seen coming. The locations listed in the end credits include Trump Castle Casino Resort in Atlantic City, where the exterior of the helicopter attack was shot. The Trump era has been full of Godfather references. Some are from mainsteam media, including a 2018 Atlantic Magazine article with the headline Donald Trump Goes Full Fredo, comparing a Trump tweet saying that he is “like, really smart” to Fredo famously insisting in Godfather II, “I’m smart! Not like everybody says, like dumb, I’m smart!” Similarly, Twitter trolls routinely mock the president’s circle and his grown children as Fredos, portraying them as weak and bumbling like the character, including pasting Donald Trump Jr’s head on a photo of Fredo’s body. Donald Trump himself regularly attacks CNN’s Chris Cuomo by calling him Fredo. Godfather II even turned up in court documents charging Trump’s advisor Roger Stone with obstructing justice, citing an email in which Stone asked someone to protect him the way Frankie Pentangeli covered up for the Corleones. Today the location credit lands like a coda to the end of the Trump presidency, and offers a reminder of how influential the Godfather films have been, even when they were embraced for all the wrong reasons.
Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone is available on BluRay and streaming from 8 December.
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