OGIC: The eyes have it

My paid workload is at something like an all-time height this week and into next, so consider this just poking my head in. I’ve been in this boat for a while, leading a narrowed life. But I did carve out some time last weekend for something special: a first-ever viewing of The Godfather on the big screen, and a gorgeous new print at that. In a recent story in Slate, Fred Kaplan walked readers through the heroically painstaking process through which Coppola’s masterpiece, and its even greater sequel, were restored to their original glory.
The quality of the picture and sound, and of course the liberation from living-room scale, made the film a new experience. We noticed details that were easy to lose in the background in previous viewings–a tear in Tom Hagen’s eye in one scene and numerous details of setting throughout. But Al Pacino’s performance is the element that most benefits from the restoration as far as I’m concerned. It’s a more subtle and powerful performance than I knew before. And it’s all in the eyes.
The transformation of Michael Corleone is tracked as much in his countenance and expression as in his speech, actions, and gestures. Pacino conveys all of this with terrific restraint, building his performance from the eyes out. After the incident outside the hospital, Michael becomes a strikingly more self-contained figure–composed, calculating, and almost shrunken–so that the eyes become his main conduit of expression. They’re darting and furtive in the earliest scenes following the blow to Michael’s face, the scenes in which the hits on Sollozzo and McCluskey are planned and carried out and Michael is still making rookie mistakes like betraying his surprise when the car gets on a bridge to Jersey. But the eyes themselves eventually come under discipline, too, growing steady and dead well before the final settling of accounts.
The new print is an electrifying experience, and one that really makes you lament what’s happened to Pacino. If you knew him only from such latter-day growling and bellowing as his performances in, say, Heat and Any Given Sunday, would you even recognize him here?
I can hardly wait to see Part II.