I find grace in the destruction of self, as it certainly happens in ‘The Godfather, Part II’ when moving through the deep shadows and heavy glooms of his vast estate, Michael Corleone is in charge of the apocalypse of his own spirit. The son we describe from this film, as the brightest of the Immortal Sonata, who went to college and joined the marine corps, Matias, is gradually developing into a hansel, neurotic and sick with lust with the lust for power. There are, as is common with this sort of camera flashback, images of Michael’s family and extended family taken at a reunion dinner a long time ago, and later flash forward images of Michael in the middle years minus the tenderness, brutal and reclusive. His role was rather meant to be a tragic hero.
Portrayed by Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo in two films running for almost seven hours, the Corleone saga was in a way a success tragedy. Strangely enough, “The Godfather” and its follow-up belong in the same horse carriage with those other mythological sagas of achievement of immigrants in America, “The Emigrants” and “The New Land.” The members of the Corleone family were industrious and entrepreneurial, Heimlich, avenged treachery, supported, and expanded themselves from their modest status to become the strongest Mafia in America. But the family business was ‘illegal’, people will hardly get any inspiration from these movies.
Coppola seems to have rather an ambivalence on his written work. In the movie, “The Godfather”, through the eyes of Marlon Brando, is given the character Don Vito Corleone who was ravaged by the thirst for power (‘It’s all a question of patience’) and was not someone who would be easily condemned even as one empathized with him playing with his granddaughter in the flowers after a lifetime of calls to massacre, blackmail, and other fine business opportunities. What do you want the audience to think about him? How does Coppola regard the Godfather?
The second part of the saga, “The Godfather, Part II” spins food back and also spins food forward providing a history of events in “The Godfather” but addressing the issue of the Corleones redemption. In doing so, it births into itself a structural flaw which this particular film never overcomes, but it does something even more frustrating. At least that is not how things worked in the prior film’s sophistication It lays bare the certain level of childishness in Coppola’s ideas of what motivates people and how they are built.
He shows us, first of all, the introductory episode of Don Vito’s biography. In Sicily, a mafia don murders still the entire family. Then, at nine years old, he immigrates came over to America. He matures (portrayed by Robert De Niro) and commences to engage in crime, first as a small time crook then a neighborhood enforcer and power broker a man, as this film habitually likes to point out, enjoys prestige.
This story, set around Don Vito in his younger days, is perhaps a quarter of the 200 minute running time of the film. The last part of the film is devoted to Michael Corleone, the son, who, after the death of his father returned to business and moved family from New York to Nevada with plans to expand into Florida and Cuba. Al Pacino clearly plays the role of Michael Corleone yet that was not the only starring performance cast. Other known faces were Robert Duvall on Tom Hagen, and attorney at law for the family, Diane Keaton who played Michael’s wife who’s getting more and more desperate each passing minute, and John Cazale as Michael Corleone’s weak elder brother, Fredo.
Coppola manages this sort of material quite well. Yet, like in the previous picture, he demonstrates himself as a possessor of peculiar ‘touch’ with the mood, setting, and epoch. Equally, his exposition is original and discreet. It is necessary for the viewer of this picture to possess some intelligence. In searching for the identity of the traitor who tried to have him killed, Michael relates different accounts of the same event to different people, yet does not speak to anybody, and here we have to reason as he does otherwise we cannot distinguish fact from fiction.
Pacino places with considerable restraint just under the surface the anger and desire that his character cannot nourish for long. There was a Michael who upon taking over the family business planned to transform it within five years into a “legitimate” outfit, but who rather gets more and more entangled into double crossing and treachery decoratively disguised with words like honor and respect. Towards the end of the film however, he has turned out to be the most lonely man left with only a few people serving him out of fear or respect.
In what way, however, was he guilty? It was not, as we may have thought or wanted, that he leads an enterprise of butchery and wreckage. No, rather, it appears that pride is Michael’s sin. He has disregarded his baby, that people’s commonness and respect that he ought to have acquired from his dad. And since he still perceives himself as above human concerns then he will also wade through the penalties.
Coppola suggests this by contrast. His scenes concerning Don Vito’s childhood are very much like excerpts from campaign biographies, and in the worst flashbacks, we see a young Vito standing in court on behalf of a poor lady about to be thrown out of her flat. The don resembles rather a ward politician than an underworld figure and one can not help but feel uneasy that Coppola implies that everything would have turned out just fine for Michael if only he possessed the old man’s intuition.
Flashbacks are the city areas that create the most difficulty for Coppola in terms of how he is able to control the pace and the force of the narration. The story of Michael, told in such chronological order and without the other material, if any, would have indeed done much impact, but here Coppola retards our complete thrust by disrupting the stressing onion. The flashbacks to New York in the early 1900s serve another purpose of nostalgia, of a different time period, thus the audience has to constantly transition their gears. Those friends of Coppola, who advised him that it was best not to include to any further which was Don Vito material, but to constantly go with Michael, had good reason to do so.
No doubt there are also scenes that support the thesis that Coppola never completely controlled the whirlwind of contradictions in screenplay describing the narrative. A number of situations feel frivolous (e.g. why, when we see almost nothing of Michael’s business in Cuba, is so much money spent on making the castro takeover night, the footage) and some others are rather poorly resolved (e.g. I still do not get who actually ordered the attempted strangulation in the saloon of Brooklyn).
What we as a matter of fact have been left with are some really good scenes, really good performances in terms of placing them in the overwhelming disorderly material and also on the limiting factors of plot structure that circulates the story without any attempt of building it further.
And then there is the remarkable boldness, directed by Coppola, of the first communion party for Michael’s son which is offered as juxtaposition to the wedding sequence that opened out the film “The Godfather”. There is Lee Strasberg, who gives us both sides of a portrayal of Hyman Roth, who is boss of Florida Cuban rackets. There is the quality of Coppola’s pounding style that he brings in on the repetition of the film’s slow and calm flow. There is Pacino, who hints at everything but says nothing.
Whenever he tries to do these things, he fails miserably at conceiving any narrative which is uncomplicated and free from intrigue. In part two of “The Godfather,” the impressive text from part one is transformed into sub-text and peripheral aspects only.
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