Sherlock Holmes vs. The Godfather 0 comments

By Lindsey Crittenden

I’ve never liked scary movies, especially scary movies involving black magic, sorcery, Satanic possession. Even writing those words creeps me out. So, watching the opening scene of the new Sherlock Holmes, I cringed. I’d envisioned pipes and deerstalker caps and perhaps some hounds, and here was human sacrifice in a crypt. Bad guys in black capes and crooked front teeth and pale skin; pentagrams and spells and what appeared to be resurrection from a grave. A crow appeared menacingly in each scene featuring the evil Lord Blackwood.

Oh, boy, I thought. Do I want to sit through this?

Yes, I’m suggestible, and frightened of where my mind might go under suggestion, even as I remind myself that my faith should be strong enough to withstand such temptation.

But perhaps withstanding temptation is my job. I read, just last night, of the words of John of Chrysostom: “Do not blame your sin on Satan, for if you do, neither repentance nor pardon can be yours.” In other words, take responsibility. Faith can strengthen us, of course, but it’s up to us which path we go down. Typing scary words alone doesn’t compel us to do bad things.

During the movie, Holmes’s reliance on facts and insistence on rational explanations reassured me. In the penultimate scene—spoiler alert—Holmes confronts Blackwood and explains away all the black magic (the guy who burst into flame? Sprinkled with chemicals. The possessed prison guard? Bribed. The resurrection? A soluble glue that allowed Blackwood to burst free from sandstone). Reason had trumped sorcery, and I walked out of the theater relieved and entertained, no more frightened than if I’d sat through It’s Complicated.

And yet this didn’t put the matter to rest. A few nights before going to Sherlock Holmes, my nephew and I watched The Godfather on DVD. It’s a gorgeous movie, a compelling, nuanced narrative of family and loyalty and betrayal and, yes, evil. Just watch the change in Al Pacino’s face from the opening scene, when Michael Corleone shows up at his sister’s wedding with the WASP girl on his arm, to the end of the movie when he looks at that same girl—now his wife—and tells her point-black that No, he had nothing to do with his brother-in-law’s murder.

We know otherwise, of course, and we see in Michael’s cold gaze how fully he’s sold his soul. Compare this to the penultimate scene of Sherlock Holmes (second spoiler alert): Evil, in the person of Blackwood, swings by the neck from a chain on a bridge over the Thames. It’s a cinematic shot, pure movie-making: the industrialized gray city, the moiling river below, the cloud-racked sky. It makes one shudder, but only as an image. It doesn’t haunt.

The last scene of The Godfather is pure image too, as the door to Michael’s office closes on his wife and on any prospect of going legit, as the lackeys gather round to pay homage to the new don. Michael’s transformation is complete (at last for Part I) in the chilling way he’s lied to Kay, in his vows at the baptism of his godchild while the camera cuts to his hit men taking out the competition, in the cold assessment in his dark emotionless eyes.

Part III will bring Michael’s attempt at redemption (as well as Al Pacino’s aging into a haggard face and unfortunate haircut) —but for now, the image of those eyes haunts us far beyond any black cape and prosthetic vampire-like front tooth.

Comparing these two movies is unfair, but I couldn’t help mull over the intersections. There’s no black magic (fake or not) in The Godfather—just a bloody horse’s head and close range gunshots and tips on making tomato sauce when the wise guys get together for dinner. Evil isn’t just occasionally banal, it’s downright domesticated. And far more chilling. Blackwood is textbook bad guy, a weird hybrid of Da Vinci code and Dr. No, wanting to take over England (and take back her American colonies) and rule the masses with fear.

Michael is a man sucked back into the family business despite his initial ambition to not be like his father. When he comes home to see and protect his ailing father, what grown child with an aging parent can’t relate? Michael’s brother is killed, his Sicilian bride blown up by a car bomb—more violent than the average family complications, yes, but entirely believable in their pull.

And yet none of that—in the world of the movie—lets him off the hook. The fact that Michael has his reasons for going bad—whereas we never see Blackwood’s—doesn’t just make his story more realistic, it makes it more human. We see, and shiver, at the responsibility inherent in the oldest struggle of all, in the deadening of those dark eyes.