The Godfather on Christmas Eve

We watched The Godfather last night, Christmas Eve. What makes The Godfather a Christmas movie? Well, a long and crucial sequence of it takes place during the holidays. Actually, it's cold all through the film -- in Michael's heart! So it's a dark film, physically as well as thematically, well suited to long winter nights. (Surprisingly, it opened in theaters in March.)

But the choice had as much to do with our movie selection at home. A surprising number of the movies we own are summer films, such as Y Tu Mama Tambien and In The Heat of the Sun. Of course, most of our movies are Chinese, which didn't quite fit the mood. We even own one we've never seen, but somehow Violent Cop seems like an unlikely Christmas Eve movie.

It was the fourth or fifth time I'd seen The Godfather, and I was surprised it was so easy to watch, never slowing down for its nearly three-hour running time. The plot felt more coherent and less sprawling than before. Nothing succeeds like excess, and as in Moby Dick and Into The Wild, it works wonders here. The Godfather never stops telling us it's about the Godfather. Of course, it's about more than that: innocence lost, the American Dream, hypocrisy, the greed and brutality that drives our cheery capitalism. I was stunned again by Al Pacino's performance and noticed that the aforementioned chill in his heart is there from the very beginning. Despite the fact that his family thinks of him as the innocent son, it's like he was born a monster. Which is not a very seasonal observation for Christmas Eve, but hey, it's just a movie, and a miraculously good one, too.