Le Parrain, 2ᵉ partie

One of the all time greats. Or probably the alone greatest thing ever made in the history of cinematography. This movie is both "prequel" and "sequel" of the first godfather movie. I have never watched anything like this in my entire life. This movie has explained the life of underworld people in a great way. It also shows how vengeance eradicates happiness from your life. People don't even care about their family in greed of power. It's a masterpiece that can never be written off even after centuries. Even if you are not into these kind of movies, I will suggest to watch it for atleast once in your life or you'll be deprived of one of the greatest things to watch that have been ever made.

The Godfather Part 2 is the finest sequel ever made and is arguably a finer film than the original Godfather. The film is divided into two main parts - the story of a young Vito Corleone (flawlessly acted by Robert De Niro and a worthy Oscar winner) and the rise to power of Michael as the head of the family. Francis Coppola recollaborated with many of the crew members of the first film and again achieves a quite superb period piece thanks to the cinematography of Gordon Willis and set design of Dean Tavoularis. The acting performances are outstanding, hence three supporting oscar nominations for acting guru Lee Strasberg (Hyman Roth), Michael Gazzo (Frank Pentangeli) and Robert De Niro (young Vito Corleone). Duvall, Keaton, Cazale and Shire all provided first rate performances but it is the performance of Al Pacino which steals the show, expertly portraying Michael as a cool, calculating, suspicious Don Corleone. The film expands upon the original movie and brings us into the family's activities in Nevada, Florida and Havana. Arguably the finest movie of the 70s, a cinematic masterpiece with the greatest ensemble acting you will probably see.

Series note: It is almost unthinkable to watch this film without having seen The Godfather (1972) first. This is a direct continuation of that story.

The good news is that The Godfather Part II has many amazing qualities, including fantastic performances from a superb cast, sublime, unprecedented visuals that no one else has been able to capture since, and very engaging stories. The bad news is that this should have easily been a 10, but overall, it is so sprawling and unfocused that I can't possibly give it more than a 9, which it only earns because the assets transcend what's basically a mess overall. Because it should have been a 10, and most other reviews will tell you about the positive points at length, I may pick on more things in my review than you would think I would for a 9, but rest assured that even with the flaws, The Godfather Part II is still essential viewing.

Director/co-writer Francis Ford Coppola cleverly begins the film with parallels to The Godfather. We see Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) "in the role" of his father, Vito (Marlon Brando), from the first film, accepting prostrating guests while a party is going on outside. Like the first film, the party consumes a lot of time while we get to know some of the principal characters. Perhaps during this segment, perhaps a bit after, we realize that maybe the beginning wasn't so clever after all, because the structure of The Godfather Part II parallels The Godfather from a broad perspective, as if Coppola and co-writer Mario Puzo used the first film as something of a template to create this one.

After the party is over, there is an attempted hit on Michael, and we quickly learn that not everything is rosy in the Corleone's mafia world. Michael believes that someone on the "inside" was involved with the hit. This launches a complicated sequence of events that has Michael, who is now living in Nevada, traveling to Miami, Cuba, New York, and so on. He accuses different people of involvement in the attempted hit depending on whom he is talking to. This may have all been part of a grand scheme to set up the responsible parties, but one of the flaws of the film is that Coppola doesn't convey Michael's underlying thoughts about this very well, not even later, and not through his actions. Rather than feeling like a clever set-up, it starts to feel like slightly muddled writing.

During the middle section of the film, which goes on for hours, we also have a hint of a problem that plagued The Godfather--a bloated cast. There are bit too many characters who aren't well enough presented or explained. You may need to keep a scorecard.

Coppola and Puzo also treat us to many extended "flashback" segments, and I mean way back, to Vito as a boy and young man, played by Robert De Niro. For my money, these were the best scenes of the film, although maybe that's a bit of my bias creeping in, as I'm a huge De Niro fan.

But let's talk about the main plague of the film--sprawl. This is maybe first evident in the flashbacks. As good as they are, they go on far too long, and happen far too frequently, to sustain the momentum of either the Michael story or the Vito-as-a-youngster story. It begins to feel like we're toggling back and forth between two films, which is the track that should have been taken. The prequel, at least, would have been a solid 10.

There's also a lot of sprawl in the Michael Corleone segments. Coppola appears to have been suffering from what I'd now call "J.K. Rowling Syndrome". That happens when an artist becomes successful enough that they can fire or ignore their editor(s). Instead of taking good advice about where to trim fat, the artist decides to just leave much of it in, and they now have the clout to override any dissenting and more sensible opinions. The Michael Corleone story has a lot of fat, including much of the Cuba material (for example, sitting around the table with the President, laboriously passing around a solid gold telephone), the Senate hearings (which go on far too long to make and provide the dramatic points), and so on.

The film begins to feel more like a couple seasons of a television show that Coppola tried to cram into a 3 and a half hour film, or worse, a collection of deleted scenes. The scenes, except for the fat that needed to be trimmed, are excellent in isolation. But by the time the climax rolls around, the whole has more of an arbitrary feeling--this is especially clear in the dénouement, which seems to just end.

I've barely left myself room to talk about the good points. The first one, which most people mention, is the acting. There isn't a bad performance in the film, but Pacino, De Niro, and some relatively minor characters, like those played by Diane Keaton, Talia Shire and John Cazale, really stand out.

The second outstanding point, similar to the first film, is the beautiful visuals. Although all of the cinematography and production design is great, what really impressed me were some of the darkly lit scenes. Characters and features of sets emerge from pitch-blackness, and everything is rich, deep shades of burgundy, brown, and orange. Amazingly, nothing gets lost in these scenes. It must be incredibly difficult to achieve without making the shots too dark, because I can't remember another film since that has been able to capture the same look. The flashback scenes are also in similar, but lighter, colors, creating an appropriate sepia-tone feel.

Although the broad perspective problems are unfortunate, a closer focus on most segments of the film provides exemplary artistry. Given that, and the film's importance culturally, The Godfather Part II is a must-see.

Nino Rota's musical score plays an even greater role in this equal but different successor than it did in the predecessor. Yearning, lamenting, stimulating bygone ages, see how infectiously Nino Rota's music affects our sentiments for the savage events on screen. It is the pulse of the films. One cannot imagine them without their Nino Rota music. Against all our realistic deduction, it guides us to how to feel about the films, and condition us to understand the characters within their own world. Throughout the Corleone family's many criminal actions, we understand that one doesn't have to be a monster in order to live with having done them.

In what is both a dual expansion of its predecessor and a masterpiece of juxtaposition in itself, we see Michael Corleone forfeit his remaining shreds of morality and become an empty shell, insecure and merciless. As his father quietly knew in his latter days would be so, Michael has lost sight of those values that made Don Corleone better than he had to be and has become a new godfather every bit as evil as he has to be. The score, with its tonal harmony, its honeyed and emotional aesthetics, is sad, and music can often evoke emotion more surely and subtly than story. Consider several operas with ridiculous stories and lyrics yet contain arias that literally move us to tears.

The devolution of Michael Corleone is adjacent with flashbacks to the youth and young manhood of his father, Vito, played with paternal, home-loving subtlety by Robert De Niro. These scenes, in Sicily and old New York at the turn of the century, follow the conventional pattern of a young man on the rise and show the Mafia code being burned into the Corleone blood. No false romanticism conceals the necessity of murder to do business. We don't look at Vito as a victim of his environment, but a product of the depiction of the resorts to which the Italian culture had turned, initially to both protect their homeland and protect their livelihood as immigrants who came to America to be paid less than the blacks.

The film opens in 1901 Corleone, Sicily, at the funeral procession for young Vito's father, who had been killed by the local Mafia chieftain, Don Ciccio, over an insult. During the procession, Vito's older brother is also murdered because he swore to avenge his father. Vito's mother goes to Ciccio to beg for the life of young Vito. When he refuses, she sacrifices herself to allow Vito to escape. They scour the town for him, warning the sleeping townsfolk against harboring the boy. With the aid of a few of the townspeople, Vito finds his way by ship to Ellis Island, where an immigration agent, mishearing Vito's hometown of Corleone as his name, registers him as Vito Corleone. From this very opening, and the events that gradually follow, we see that Vito's damnable early experiences have enhanced his sense of family, and his experience of revenge as a necessity was passed on to Vito's sons.

The life of young Vito helps to explain the forming of the adult Don Corleone. As his unplanned successor Michael, his youngest child, transforms, we hark back to why, when his true desire is to make the Corleone family completely legitimate, he feels that he must play the game by its old rules. His wife says, "You once told me: 'In five years, the Corleone family will be completely legitimate.' That was seven years ago." What we have are two all-too-real narratives, two superb lead performances and lasting images. There is even a parallel between two elderly dons: Revenge must be had.

I admire the way Coppola and Puzo require us to think along with Michael as he feels out fragile deliberations involving Miami boss Hyman Roth, his older brother Fredo, and the death of Sonny in the previous film. Who is against him? Why? Michael drifts several explanations past several key players, misleading them all, or nearly. It's like a game of blindfolded chess. He has to envision the moves without seeing them. Coppola shows Michael breaking under the burden. We recall that he was a war hero, a successful college student, forging an honest life. Ultimately Michael has no one by whom to swear but his aging mother. Michael's desolation in that scene of dialogue informs the film's closing shot.

So this six-time Oscar-winning three-and-a-half-hour gangster epic is ultimately a dreary experience, a mourning for what could've been. It is a contrast with the earlier film, in which Don Corleone is seen defending old values against modern hungers. Young Vito was a murderer, too, as we more fully understand in the Sicily and New York scenes of Part II. But he was wise and diplomatic. Murder was personal. As Hyman Roth says, "It had nothing to do with business." The crucial difference between the father and son is that Vito is cognizant of and comprehending the needs, feelings, problems, and views of others, and Michael grows in the very opposite direction. Whereas the first movie was a taut ensemble piece, this second part is a more leisurely film that closely studies only these two characters, neither of whom share scenes with each other. Everyone else is periphery.

It must be seen as a piece with the consummate mastership of The Godfather. When the characters in a film truly take on a simulated environmental existence for us, it becomes a film that everyone who cherishes movies to any extent should see at least once.

Francis Coppola and Mario Puzo continue their epic saga into the lives of the infamous Corleone family, which is headed by Michael Corleone (Al Pacino). It is a film which does better than its predessor, "The Godfather". The film flip-flops graciously and beautifully between Michael's struggle over the family business and the life of young Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro, in a brilliant, Oscar-winning performance) in his rise to power as well. Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, Lee Strassberg, and John Cazale give excellent supporting performances. Carmine Coppola's and Nino Rota's score is a masterpiece of music. The movie is expertly filmed and the cinematography is superb.