Chapter Two - The Godfather: Part II
By Brett Beach
November 19, 2009
BoxOfficeProphets.com
"The stunning text of The Godfather is replaced [here} with prologues, epilogues, footnotes, and good intentions." --Roger Ebert
One of the joys for me of writing this column is that it allows me to spill out trivia in a context where it might be seen as more than just trivial. As someone who often bemoans the fact that my brain is less of a sieve and more of a flytrap or roach motel for movie facts and figures, it's very helpful to have an outlet and a weekly deadline. In all honesty, it's conducive to my mental well being as well. In sifting through facts for this week's installment of Chapter Two, I confirmed a very interesting set of circumstances that, though they are far less shadowy than those bizarre parallels that are to be found uniting the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations, are nonetheless intriguing in their unities.
To wit: Francis Ford Coppola and Bob Fosse each made a fairly small number of films in the 1970s. Coppola directed four. These were The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather: Part II, and Apocalypse Now. They were released in 1972, 1974, 1974, and 1979, respectively. Fosse directed three. These were Cabaret, Lenny and All That Jazz, released in 1972, 1974, and 1979, respectively. All seven of these films were nominated for Best Picture. Six of these films resulted in Best Director nominations for Coppola or Fosse (Coppola was not nominated for The Conversation.) Fosse won an Oscar for Cabaret, Coppola for The Godfather: Part II, and both men lost out to Robert Benton, who won for Kramer vs. Kramer.
Again, this ties in only tangentially with this week's themes but there is a certain balance to it all. I would use the word coincidence except I am not a big fan of the word or the concept. If you pull back your sense of perspective far enough and see as much of the big picture as you can, what at first seems like chance or randomness simply reveals how everything is connected. And what I really mean to suggest with all this is that...Roy Scheider was robbed (robbed!) of a deserved win for Best Actor for All That Jazz. Having celebrated my birthday back in January by watching that (and The Sound of Music) for the first time, I was dazzled with how vibrant and electric and pulsating Scheider's performance was. I was also shocked to discover that I knew every song save one from The Sound of Music thanks to media exposure, highlight reels, and Gwen Stefani pop songs.
Back on track: The Godfather: Part II has 57 positive reviews and one negative review out on Rotten Tomatoes. On IMDb, it currently holds the #3 position in the top 250, behind The Shawshank Redemption and The Godfather. Nearly 85% of the voters rank it an 8 or better. The only demographic with a median score of less than an 8.3 is Females 18 years or under. Ebert's three-star review from which the second quote at the top is taken is as close as you might wish to find to dissent on the issue and even that was somewhat negated with his inclusion of the film on his Great Movies list last year. What do I have to add? Adolescent girls take heart; we are in alignment on at least one issue.
I believe I used the phrase "embalmed and enshrined" in a somewhat facile manner a few weeks ago when I referred to my love of Once Upon a Time in America (and I must also add Miller's Crossing) over The Godfather films. I should revise that slightly. Let me first draw a comparison. I may prefer several of Orson Welles' other pictures (The Magnificent Ambersons, Touch of Evil, F For Fake) to Citizen Kane but I admit wholeheartedly that Kane is a great film.
The Godfather is a very, very good film - pulp raised to the level of art and transformed into the forerunner of all the event blockbusters that have followed in the four decades since. Technical achievements aside, The Godfather rested on Coppola and Mario Puzo's screenplay - rich with great material for actors to sink their teeth into. The casting was a brilliant mix of the iconic (Brando, Hayden) with up-and-comers (Pacino, Cazale, Caan) who were allowed to achieve almost an iconic status themselves. The closing shot of Michael Corleone shutting the door on his wife Kay and by extension everything in his life outside of his chambers, is chilling and majestic in its tragic implications. Michael's fate has been sealed.
The Godfather: Part II opens that door back up to poke around some more and make sure the audience understands exactly how tragic those implications were. It does it with many of the same talented actors in front of the camera and technicians behind the scenes. It would be an accomplishment and deserving of all this praise, if it felt in the least bit necessary. Coppola and Puzo again collaborate on a screenplay that becomes the filmic equivalent of the fire and brimstone preacher of yore. You know the one. He told the crowd exactly what he was going to tell them, he told them, and then he finished up by telling ‘em what he had told them.
The story structure of The Godfather: Part II is meant to evoke meaningful parallels with The Godfather by charting the spiraling destruction of Michael with the rise to power of his father, Vito Corleone. In theory, this might have yielded a tragedy of even greater proportions. Instead, it undercuts the power of the original and results in over three and a quarter hours of stasis. A lot happens in the film, to be certain. There is sound and fury, silent brooding and violent explosion of emotions, and death by gunshot, wrist slitting, grenade and garroting. Although there are individual scenes that serve as emphatic punctuation, most of the film seems devoted to covering the same ground or stuck in neutral. The alternating storylines is in large part responsible for this alienating effect.
The Godfather: Part II has a running time of 200 minutes. Fifty-five minutes of this run time, or just over a quarter of the film, are given up to the young Vito from age nine in 1901 to his early 30s in the 1920s. This progression is broken out in roughly ten-minute chunks over the course of the film. I have never read The Godfather but understand that these early scenes are mostly taken from the novel and were originally going to be used in the first film. Aside from feeling like a Reader's Digest condensed version of a generic Young Mafioso's Rise to Power, they also strip away a lot of the aura created by Brando in his quirky, mysterious and terrifying portrayal. I liken it to feeling the need to humanize a character like Hannibal Lecter. Yeah, back stories can be great things but sometimes it's more powerful not having everything summed up and spelled out. Vito Corleone seems like a mostly genial fella (well, as genial as DeNiro can seem meaning when he's smiling sincerely is when you should be most worried that he may put his arm round you and shove a knife into your gut.) He knocks off the don who controls the neighborhood with an iron fist, gets revenge on the killer of his family back in the Old Country, and sees it to that kindly old ladies aren't thrown out on the street because they have dogs that yip too much. In short, your friendly neighborhood Godfather.
The Godfather's tag line (you know which one) even gets trotted out, so everyone can smile in recognition, I guess. The film begins with the first part of his abbreviated saga and never quite recovers from this decision. In a film with a lot of interesting and colorful character actors, DeNiro is quite shockingly not all that good. Looking back at this performance with 35 years of hindsight may seem unfair, but the tics of Travis Bickle, Rupert Pupkin, and Paul Vitti all seem in their nascent stages at various times here.
So the mystique of Vito Corleone is rubbed away, and these nostalgic "flashbacks" never coalesce into anything more than sepia-toned vignettes, but The Godfather: Part II also works too hard to emulate sequences from The Godfather for easy dramatic compare and contrast. The Communion reception for Anthony Corleone and Michael's receiving line of requests is meant to invoke our introduction to the Corleones via Connie's wedding in the first film. The juxtaposition of baptism with brutal rubouts that climaxed the first film is here given a more elegiac reprise as Michael follows through on the murders (Hyman Roth, Fredo) that will eliminate his "enemies" and isolate him completely once and for all. The key driving plot mystery of the sequel, who ordered the attempted hit on Michael in his home, is answered after a fashion, I guess, but what I find more interesting and which the film never really contemplates, is that Michael may just as well have ordered the shooting on himself. It gives him an excuse to indulge his paranoia, cast suspicion on his closest business partners, and withdraw further into the shadows of his own guilt.
Pacino is, for the most part, dynamic. This is an incredibly tricky task if you consider that the self-made trap he has built largely confines the range of his character. He has to keep his true emotions hidden, his real intentions obscured, and his reactions imperceptible. Coppola isn't as subtle, particularly in the scene where Fredo inadvertently reveals himself as Michael's key betrayer. The heavy-handed editing in this moment sinks the drama of the revelation. As in the first Godfather, casting performers who seem generically perfect (in the best sense) for the roles contributes a level of authenticity that carries the film through the structurally shaky moments. Famed acting coach Lee Strasberg and long-time character actor Michael V. Gazzo (the also-rans to DeNiro in the Best Supporting Actor category) are the best two examples of this. Strasberg is slight and completely unimposing and yet he imbues Roth with an enveloping air of menace without ever doing anything overt to create that menace. Gazzo is raspy and wheezy and slightly pathetic and with his faded, thick mustache becomes like the gangster reimagined as a dying walrus. His final dialogue with Robert Duvall easily contains the hidden levels and air of tragic regret that The Godfather: Part II works so furiously to obtain elsewhere.
I return to the quote from Michael at the start of the column. I remembered and was familiar with a lot of the quotes from Part II. Like The Godfather, Part II has chunks of great stand-alone sentences strewn throughout. But the quote from Michael strikes me as....well, fairly ridiculous. When Pacino uttered it, I laughed. And then it struck me. This is really what the second installment comes down to, for me at least. It stands as proof of Michael's edict that no one is immune from the reach of his life-snuffing grasp. I don't begrudge Coppola opting to return to world of The Godfather a second time. Nothing on screen in any way suggests that this was a cash grab disguised as an epic. His intentions seem highly noble, his desire to evolve this tragic saga even further admirable. But in this case, his reach exceeds what he delivers. The Godfather: Part II has moments that snap and crackle - Michael and Kay's verbal assault on each other, the tracking shot that follows Vito across a rooftop as he prepares to kill Fanucci - but they are few and far between.