Moving through the deep shadows and heavy miseries of
his huge manor, Michael Corleone supervises over the destruction of his own
spirit in “The Godfather, Part II,” released in 1974. The character we remember
from the first movie as the best and smartest of Don Vito’s sons, the one who
went to college and joined the Marines, grows into a cold and cruel man,
obsessed with power. The film’s ending give us first a memory of a long-ago
family dinner, and then Michael at mid-life, cruel, closed, and lonely. He’s
clearly implied as a tragic character.
The Corleone story, as created by Francis Ford Coppola
and Mario Puzo in two films with a runtime of nearly seven hours, has been a
type of success story backwards. Roger Ebert compared in his review, “In a
crazy way, “The Godfather” and its sequel belong in the same category with
those other epics of immigrant achievement in America, “The Emigrants” and “The
New Land.”” The Corleone family worked hard, was ambitious, remembered friends,
never forgave betrayal, and started from modest beginnings to become the most
powerful Mafia business in the country. If it were not that the family business
was crime, these films could be an inspiration for everyone.
Coppola seems to have a certain contradiction toward
his work. Don Vito Corleone as played by Marlon Brando in “The Godfather” was a
man of honor and dignity, and it was difficult not to sympathize with him, playing
with his grandchild in the garden, at peace after a long lifetime of murder, blackmail,
and the noises. What exactly were we supposed to think about him? How did
Coppola feel toward the Godfather?
“The Godfather, Part II” goes back and forth from the
events in “The Godfather,” trying to tell us about the Corleones. Ebert said, “In
doing so, it provides for itself a structural weakness from which the film
never recovers, but it does something even more disappointing: It reveals a
certain simplicity in Coppola’s notions of motivation and characterization that
wasn’t there in the elegant masterpiece of his earlier film.”
First off, he gives us the beginning of Don Vito’s
life. Ebert described, “His family is killed by a Mafia don in Sicily, he comes
to America at the age of nine, he grows up (to be played by Robert De Niro), and
edges into a career of crime, first as a penny-ante crook and then as a
neighborhood arranger and power broker: a man, as the movie never tires of
reminding us, of respect.”
The parts of Don Vito’s youth takes up maybe a fourth
of the film’s 200-minute runtime. Coppola spends the rest on Michael Corleone,
who has taken over the family’s business after his father passes, has moved out
of New York, and merged business in Nevada, and wants to expand in Florida and
Cuba. Michael is reprised by, and brilliantly, by Al Pacino, and among the
other reprising cast are Robert Duvall as Tom Hagen, the family’s lawyer, Diane
Keaton as Michael’s increasingly hopeless wife Kay, and John Cazale as the weak
older brother Fredo.
Coppola handles a lot of this material very well. Ebert
said, “As in the earlier film, he reveals himself as a master of mood,
atmosphere, and period. And his exposition is inventive and subtle. The film
requires the intelligent participation of the viewer; as Michael attempts to
discover who betrayed him and attempted his assassination, he tells different
stories to different people, keeping his own counsel, and we have to think as
he does so we can tell the truth from the lies.”
Ebert continued, “Pacino is very good at suggesting
the furies and passions that lie just beneath his character’s controlled
exterior. He gives us a Michael who took over the family with the intention of
making it “legitimate” in five years, but who is drawn more and more deeply
into a byzantine web of deceit and betrayal, all papered over with code words
like respect, honor, and gratitude.”
However, what was his sin? It was not, as we might
have imagined or hoped, that he controlled over an evil business of murder and
destruction. No, Michael’s fault is pride. He has lost the common touch, the self-respect
he should have received from his father. On top of that, because he has lost his
humanity, he must suffer.
Coppola suggests this by contrast. Ebert said, “His
scenes about Don Vito’s early life could almost be taken as a campaign
biography, and in the most unfortunate flashbacks we’re given the young Vito
intervening on behalf of a poor widow who is being evicted from her apartment.
The don seems more like a precinct captain than a gangster, and we’re left with
the unsettling impression that Coppola thinks things would have turned out all
right for Michael if he’d had the old man’s touch.”
The flashbacks give Coppola so much difficulty in
maintaining his pace and narrative ability. Ebert said, “The story of Michael,
told chronologically and without the other material, would have had really
substantial impact, but Coppola prevents our complete involvement by breaking
the tension. The flashbacks to New York in the early 1900s have a different, a
nostalgic tone, and the audience has to keep shifting gears.” Coppola was
reportedly advised by friends to forget Vito’s story and stay with Michael, and
that was good advice.
Ebert noted, “There’s also some evidence in the film
that Coppola never completely mastered the chaotic mass of material in his
screenplay. Some scenes seem oddly pointless (why do we get almost no sense of
Michael’s actual dealings in Cuba, but lots of expensive footage about the
night of Castro’s takeover?), and others seem not completely explained (I am
still not quite sure who really did order that attempted garroting in the
Brooklyn saloon).”
Ebert continued, “What we’re left with, then, are a
lot of good scenes and good performances set in the midst of a mass of
undisciplined material and handicapped by plot construction that prevents the
story from ever really building.”
For example, there is the brilliant audacity of the
first communion party for Michael’s son, where Coppola directs as contrast to
the wedding scene at the beginning of “The Godfather.” There is Lee Strasberg’s
(acting coach and director of the Actors Studio) double-sided performance as
Hyman Roth, the boss of the Florida and Cuban business. Ebert noted, “Strasberg
gives us a soft-spoken, almost kindly old man, and then reveals his steel-hard
interior. There is Coppola’s use of sudden, brutal bursts of violence to
punctuate the film’s brooding progress.” There is Pacino, suggesting
everything, telling nothing.
However, Coppola is unable to bring everything
together and make it work in a way of easy, gripping narrative. The fabulous
text of “The Godfather” is replaced in “Part II” with prologues, epilogues, footnotes,
and good intentions.
You are missing out if you haven’t seen this movie.
People have said that this is better than the first, but I still prefer the
first one over this. Not to say that I didn’t like this sequel, no way. This is an A+
sequel to one of the greatest movies of all time. This is currently streaming
on Tubi, Pluto TV, and Paramount+, so I give it a high recommendation of seeing
this sequel if you have seen the first. This film has the famous lines, “Keep
your friends close, but your enemies closer,” “I know it was you, Fredo. You broke
my heart. You broke my heart,” (my brother used that line on me so many times
as a child, which got old really fast), and “Michael, we’re bigger than U.S.
Steel.” This sequel is another one of my favorite films.
Stay tuned next week when I look at the last, and
weakest, of “The Godfather Trilogy” in “Francis Ford Coppola.”
