The Offer debuts on Paramount+ with three episodes on April 28, 2022, followed by one new episode weekly.
It would probably be a bad idea to remake The Godfather. It would probably be a great idea to tell the story of how The Godfather was made (like the upcoming Barry Levinson movie Francis is doing). The Offer, bizarrely, tries to do both, via homages galore, and via head-scratching dramatizations that stray well past creative license and end up somewhere in the realm of fan fiction. Then again, even if the Paramount+ series were sold as a gangster fantasy, it would still be an utterly baffling watch, with a first episode so scattershot and uninteresting that even the exponential improvements in the second and third don’t feel worth the time.
The era of “trust me, it gets better” TV recommendations has finally met its match.
The series is nominally about the making of The Godfather, but what it’s really about is the strange self-mythology of producer Al Ruddy (Miles Teller), who executive produced the show, and upon whose oft-challenged recollections the story is based. It would be one thing — one fascinating thing, at that — if The Offer actually felt like a work of unhinged ego, since it so often follows a super-producer with magical charm, who jumps nearly every production hurdle with the power of words. The result, however, is about as tensionless as HBO’s Entourage, in which pretty-boy actor Vincent Chase initially doesn’t get the role he wants, but a few scenes later, he inevitably does. The difference is that Entourage was far more focused, and had something resembling a sense of time and place.
The first episode, titled “A Seat at the Table,” is directed by Dexter Fletcher, runs over an hour, and evokes the distinct feeling of watching something assembled by machines. It serves to introduce several characters key to The Godfather’s making — Rudy, studio executive Bob Evans (Matthew Goode), author and screenwriter Mario Puzo (Patrick Gallo), and mafia antagonist Joe Colombo (Giovanni Ribisi) — but it lurches forward without a discernible narrative, even when it returns to any one of their stories. Puzo, for instance, has the idea to write The Godfather in one scene, has effortlessly written it in the next, and reaps the benefits of its smashing success in the scene after that; Rudy, similarly, gets his foot in the door of Hollywood just as quickly and begins climbing its ladder at lightning speed, but no two of their scenes are connected by anything other than their own presence.
The closest thing “A Seat at the Table” has to a through line is the story of Ribisi’s sweaty, scowling Colombo, who takes offense to Puzo’s novel and eventually to the film’s production, though he shows up too infrequently to seem like a meaningful part of the episode. Rather than a narrative, the first chapter feels like a scattered rundown of backstory elements that, in any sensible production, would be truncated to a montage or a few lines of exposition, instead of being stretched out over what appears to be several years before the story actually begins (the show immediately feels like it should have been a movie instead). Its sense of time, or lack thereof, is matched by a similarly slapdash sense of place, reducing even early ’70s Hollywood parties to stilted sequences of muted chatter without any real panache — even when Rudy meets the rich, eccentric Evans for the first time at an opulent mansion, or when he meets his captivating, outspoken future wife, Francoise Glazer (Nora Arnezeder). Goode is as chaotically energetic as a figure like Evans deserves, but he’s dragged through a series that looks and feels like someone sucked all the visual energy out of Boogie Nights.
Not only does the first episode churn out an array of disconnected, clinical factoids, it does so amidst nearly ceaseless references to The Godfather while trying to mold itself off Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece. The opening shot pays homage to The Godfather Part II. The opening line even quotes the first film, and there’s a shot that lingers on a toilet in an Italian restaurant, as if to nudge you in the ribs and whisper “Remember that far superior scene?” Yet The Offer has little interest in recreating The Godfather’s narrative in anything but a superficial sense. It doesn’t play with light or shadow the way The Godfather’s cinematographer Gordon Willis did, despite similar motifs recurring throughout the show. Its shots rarely linger, and fail to unearth what lies beneath the surface of any character (Rudy’s go-getter secretary Bettye McCartt is the exception, but only because actress Juno Temple is so adept at playfully navigating a world of suits while alternatingly hiding and displaying the character’s intellect). The show simply zips from scene to scene, always in a hurry to go nowhere in particular.
The two subsequent premiere episodes — directed by Fletcher and Adam Arkin respectively — feel less haphazard in their construction, but they also suffer from near constant Easter Egg-ing. A real-life producer being left a bloody “message” in his bed recalls a similar scene in The Godfather, and while this instance is a fictional creation of the series, it isn’t re-woven into the story of how the movie came to be. It’s one of a litany of references that exists only to evoke empty nostalgia, rather than to string together a relationship between fact and fiction — despite delightful (albeit minor) subplots about how Puzo and Coppola (Dan Fogler) conceived several memorable scenes.
Fogler, who stars in the Fantastic Beasts movies, appears to have carved out a very specific niche as the warmest and most human actor in otherwise abysmal productions. His Coppola is a treat (as is Burn Gorman’s cartoonish Austrian industrialist Charles Bluhdorn, albeit for different reasons), but the buck stops there. Arnezeder shines in her role as Francoise, arriving with an immediate and alluring presence and maintaining it through glances that search for answers to whatever Rudy might be hiding — he doesn’t let her in on the tumultuous goings on of the movie’s production — but even her distinctly Godfather-esque story, of a wife pushed further and further into the margins by her husband’s business, ends up just as tensionless as Rudy’s other scenes, since most of their marital problems are smoothed over with a mere snap of his fingers (offering Teller little to work with in the process too).
Apart from the creative and logistical tensions of getting The Godfather approved at Paramount, the show’s major plot is spun from real-world anecdotes about Colombo and other mafiosos initially objecting to the film, which The Offer tries to turn into its own sprawling gangster saga. Its hyperbolic dramatizations, however, are distinctly undramatic, and are actually less interesting than some of the real events that unfolded (for instance, the show tries to reframe Colombo’s founding of the Italian-American Civil Rights League as a result of The Godfather’s production, rather than the FBI’s harassment of his son, but in the process, it creates a version of the infamous gangster who seems far less dedicated and compelling). Even if one were to ignore reality, The Offer’s version of events rarely warrants more than a shrug or a chuckle. Despite roping in dangerous mobsters to inexplicably target Rudy, it makes the making of The Godfather feel like a piece of cake, given how easily he solves every problem.
The show’s indecisive relationship to reality is best exemplified by its casting. Where Fogler captures the essence of Coppola — his cadence, his passion, his irritability — without veering too far into impersonation, The Offer’s other, more well-known personalities are flung so far in opposite directions as to be irreconcilable. Its version of Frank Sinatra (Frank John Hughes), who objected to the character of Johnny Fontane, is so un-Sinatra-like in look, stature, presence, and voice that when he’s introduced, your eyes are likely to be drawn by the more charismatic extra seated beside him (this is also function of how thoughtlessly the scene is lit and framed). Meanwhile, the series’ Al Pacino — Anthony Ippolito doing a rather caricatured impression — looks and sounds so much like a parody of Michael Corleone (rather than capturing the spirit of a young Pacino behind the scenes) that he comes off less like a real person, and more like an uncanny deep-fake programmed from archival footage (Ribisi is just as caricatured as Colombo and sounds incomprehensible; it’s like he swallowed a frog).
By the time the third episode comes to a close, even the show’s vaguely established notions of conflict seem to have been resolved. Meanwhile, the various problems looming in the characters’ futures are even more disconnected from one another than was previously the case. What does The Offer appear to promise in its remaining seven chapters? If the marginally more cohesive second and third episodes are anything to go by, one answer is borderline competence. Another is the sibling-like banter between Puzo and Coppola that, while devoid of much real artistic psychology beyond recalling familiar scenes, proves to be light and entertaining enough. However, the overarching answer appears to be little more than occasionally satisfying a few behind-the-scenes curiosities, which can just as easily be read on Wikipedia, and are probably more engaging that way as it is.
As for the actual “drama” in The Offer’s dramatizations: the show’s foundation is unnervingly rickety. It’s ready to collapse at a moment’s notice, perhaps the next time an artist or gangster with their own convictions and opinions is swiftly swayed by a mere sentence or two from Rudy, rather than undergoing a meaningful, human change.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/TxEyWmn
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