I’m glad to know not being alone in my controversial opinion that Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather Part III” is a great movie, but Luca Guadagnino takes it a step further here, and I don’t think I can join him on this team.
Guadagnino is telling Sight and Sound that not only is “The Godfather Part III” his favorite Christmas movie, but that it’s the best one of the trilogy.
What I will watch [this Christmas] is The Godfather Part III. It’s the best of the three for me. Part II is too perfect and The Godfather is too legendary. But Part III has the ambition of a man who did everything and the fragility of the man who is going toward this older part of his work and his life. And it’s full of this longing melancholy […] it has parallels with one of the great movies I love, John Huston’s The Dead [1987].
But I come back to The Godfather Part III at that time of year because usually my Christmas is quite silent: we don’t have a big family, we are not a lot of people. It’s beautiful to have the silence of the winter and immerse yourself into that movie. I have time. No more phone calls, no work. It’s a long movie [2 hours, 42 minutes] and I want to dedicate myself to that. But do not watch the version that Coppola re-edited – watch the original 1990 version. It’s a masterpiece.
That opinion is tame compared to what Guadagnino says next. He believes Coppola’s much-maligned 1996 comedy, “Jack,” is a “masterpiece.”
Coppola’s films that I love are this one and Peggy Sue Got Married [1986]. And “Jack” [1996] is one of his masterpieces. For me, a great director invisibly masters everything he does. In Jack, you feel the way in which he’s taking this kind of conventional story but bringing humanity, and the way in which the world is created. It’s so beautiful.
I’m in agreement with “Peggy Sue Got Married,” a lovely movie, but “Jack”? When I read that, I almost spat out my coffee. Holy living hell. That is certainly an opinion.
In the late ‘80s and ‘90s, Coppola agreed to direct a few movies to pay off his debts, and some of them were quite good, but he never made anything as bad as “Jack” which features Robin Williams’s attempt at trying to act like a kid. The film is filled with cringe-inducing dialogue (“I’m not bald, and I’m noy a freak”).
About the film's reception, Francis Ford Coppola said, "Jack was a movie that everybody hated and I was constantly damned and ridiculed for. I must say I find Jack sweet and amusing. I don't dislike it as much as everyone, but that's obvious—I directed it. I know I should be ashamed of it but I'm not. I don't know why everybody hated it so much. I think it was because of the type of movie it was.”
Screenwriter Gary Nadeau, who penned “Jack,” disagreed with Coppola, describing his experience of seeing the initial cut of “Jack” as terrifying. “I thought my career had ended,” he admitted to The Telegraph. “Not only that, but I’d be the man who destroyed Francis Ford Coppola’s career.”
Guadagnino is certainly entitled to his opinion, but I doubt we’ll be getting a reappraisal of “Jack” any time soon. It stands as the definitive nadir of Coppola’s career.
Criterion's December lineup has some great additions to the library, but the title that jumped out at me is Werner Herzog's "Grizzly Man," which officially joins the Collection on December 8.