While it lacks any sort of artistic authority, there’s an ironic elegance to Paramount+’s The Offer, a limited series about the making of The Godfather.
If The Godfather took a schlocky Mario Puzo novel and elevated it to prestige, The Offer has taken a prestigious movie and lowered it back down to schlock.
Based on Albert S. Ruddy’s experience of making “The Godfather”, we begin with Ruddy (Miles Teller) as an unhappy programmer for the Rand Corporation. Perhaps because of his analytical nature, Ruddy has cracked the formula of the broadcast television comedy, which he uses to launch his Hollywood career with the creation of Hogan’s Heroes.
But bad television has no appeal for Ruddy, and he finagles his way onto the Paramount lot. After a quick meeting with Robert Evans (Matthew Goode), the studio’s boy wonder, he has a production deal.
For questionable reasons, Ruddy is assigned duties producing The Godfather, the studio’s adaptation of Puzo’s (Patrick Gallo) best-selling novel.
So Ruddy sets out to make the best movie possible and to prevent anybody from being killed by the real-life Mafia, which has targeted the production thanks to agitating from ascendant gangster Joe Colombo (Giovanni Ribisi) and a generally insecure Frank Sinatra (Frank John Hughes).
Ruddy and helpful gal Friday Bettye McCartt (Juno Temple) hire Francis Ford Coppola (Dan Fogler) to work on the script with Puzo, leading to established Godfather lore like executives hating Al Pacino (Anthony Ippolito) and Marlon Brando (Justin Chambers), complaining about Gordon Willis’ (T.J. Thyne) cinematography, and general uproars about budgets and a bulging running time.
We have the Strong Female Character of Bettye McCartt (Ted Lasso’s Juno Temple) as Ruddy’s all-knowing secretary. She, alas, is not given much to do other than hastily fill her boss in on salient details about the business, love lives and credit records of the people he is about to meet on the way to meet them, and the charismatic, capable Temple remains underused.
In a world of godfathers, the godfatheriest godfather of all is the producer, specifically the producer upon whose experience of making The Godfather the series is based. Ruddy is a master at making people offers they can’t refuse, and the scripts go so far as to contrive a scene where Ruddy is sitting at Vito Corleone’s desk taking requests from his various department heads.
Despite Ruddy’s vaunted knowledge of television structure, The Offer is made without any clear sense of episodic flow. Scenes sometimes don’t connect at all in time and rarely connect in theme, and other than a couple of episodes concluding with shootouts, there’s nothing bridging one hour to the next.
The series’ directors can’t find any style that either mirrors or contrasts with the look and feel of The Godfather. It’s flatly, blandly handsome throughout.
It’s a whole lot of trivia and very little substance, but folks love trivia and I expect many a film fan will bore their kids or significant others with informative whispers of, “That was Ann-Margret!” or, “Robert Evans is going to regret letting Ali MacGraw make The Getaway” or, “And that book was made into Paper Moon!”.
There’s an effective scene in which Coppola invites the cast out for an Italian dinner before production and watches them naturally settle into their Godfather roles.
Instead, everything is flattened – including the stars and the legendary characters like Robert Evans (though Matthew Goode does a fine job with what he’s given) – and squeezed into the sole role of mythologising once again an already thoroughly mythologised subject.
There’s bound to be general affection for Goode, who looks nothing at all like Evans, but delivers a fine rendition of the legendary raconteur’s velvety tones.
He swans around in impeccably cut three-piece suits, ruling the roost at his favourite restaurant, calling everyone “Bubbi” and elevating schmooze to the finest of arts. He runs hot and cold, laying on both the charm and the bullying with a trowel, but when he collapses in a heap of self-loathing after his wife Ali McGraw (Meredith Garretson) dumps him you can’t help but will him back to his supremely cocky best.
As a teenager, after reading his autobiography, The Kid Stays in the Picture, I wanted to be Bob Evans.
Benefiting from playing two of the characters with no well-known image to speak of, Teller is thoroughly acceptable — even if The Offer fails to ever justify putting Ruddy in the spotlight of this story — and Temple sparkles as the series’ only female figure with any agency at all.
It shouldn’t take an uninspired TV series to prove how hard it is to make an inspired movie.
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