What's the AFI Project, you ask? For more information, or if you just enjoy my bemused ramblings, read here: http://www.spout.com/blogs/pippin06/archive/2008/3/1/25756.aspx
The Godfather Part II is on the following AFI lists:
The Original Top 100 (#32)
100 Years...100 Heroes and Villains (Michael Corleone is the #11 villain)
100 Movie Quotes (#58 - Michael Corleone: "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.")
The Revised Top 100 (#32)
10 Top 10's (#3 Gangster)
Since I own the Godfather trilogy, I own the second part of the trilogy. The test would have passed anyway. As much as the first one, the second Godfather movie is a masterpiece (a perfect 10 from me!). The reason why it's such a masterpiece is because, when held up to its predecessor, it feels both like a sequel and like its own separate film, that could stand on its own without knowing how Michael (Al Pacino) achieved his crime boss status. It's richer though when the viewer knows the events of the first movie. The question is whether it's better than the original. Some try to argue that it is, but I have issues with that stance. Ergo, I disagree wih that assessment, but before I discuss that opinion - plot summary!
Michael thinks he's being strong for his family, but his decisions do more to alienate and divide than to keep the Corleones together. He tries to expand the family's interests in Las Vegas and Miami with the help of a former associate of his father's, Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg), though both are engaged in a silent and duplicitous power struggle in the name of business and profit. Michael's wife Kay (Diane Keaton) tires of the threats on her life and her family and her husband's cold and distant demeanor, occasionally begging him to make the family legitimate. Michael's siblings feel various states of alienation - Connie (Talia Shire) is committed to self-destruction in the face of her overprotective older brother; Fredo (John Cazale) feels the sting of being branded the family idiot (and the consequences of that); and adoptive brother and family lawyer Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall) is treated with distrust, so much so that he comes to distrust Michael. All the while, Michael's heretofore pure intentions and aims to liberate himself from his family are long forgotten, as his ambition transforms into his spiritual degradation.
Brilliantly, his downfall is paralleled with the interspliced backstory surrounding the rise of Vito's power. Young Vito (eventually played by Oscar winner Robert DeNiro) escapes Sicily after his entire family is murdered in cold blood by the local mafia boss. He survives and manages to make it to New York City and Little Italy, where Black Hand Fanucci bullies the tenants with extortion and violence. Vito, and his friends, including a young Clemenza (Bruno Kirby), take matters into their own hands and achieve a powerful reputation and status.
Like the original movie, the second film is a thing of beauty in just how well it was made. The performances, particularly by Pacino and DeNiro, are mesmerizingly brilliantly awesome. I don't have enough adjectives for them! Bobby won the Supporting Oscar, deservedly, for evoking Marlon Brando's mannerisms and complex emotional portrayals even when he was not involved in the film. And Pacino gave his career-making performance in this film (it'll probably be referred to on his tombstone, for pete's sake). For consideration of just how good his performance is, I call attention to a couple of scenes: the scene in which Kay tells him she's leaving him; the scene in which he talks to his mother about what she believed his father used to think about; the scene in which he confronts Fredo; the scenes in the Congressional hearing; and the scenes during which he's talking to his sister Connie (at the beginning and at the end). Compare the moods of each scene and notice how Pacino morphed his silence and facial expressions into so many faces and reactions, from explosive anger to fear to heartbreaking sadness to stoicism to disappointment and resignation.
That's the genius about Michael Corleone, Pacino's performance, and Coppola's overall direction of this character and this film. Michael's supposed to be the villain. You're supposed to hate him. He's singlehandedly torn apart that which his father worked so hard to build. The family that he wanted to keep together no longer exists. Yet, he remains so oddly sympathetic; occasionally, you find yourself rooting him on. You can see, through the nuances and total picture painted by Pacino, that Michael believes that what he's doing is the right thing, even though it couldn't be more wrong. That's a powerful and poignant realization, particularly when held up in parallel to Vito who, though morally ambiguous, is never morally corrupt as his son eventually becomes. It's this fulcrum around which this second chapter revolves and what makes the film the great sequel that it is.
The art direction, the cinematography, the score - all of the technical ingredients were given the same treatment and care they were given in the first film. The flashback scenes had the grainy, gold-brown quality that made them feel like old movies, contrasting with the cold, dark ,almost oppressive hues of Michael's present. In addition, the art direction, particularly in turn-of-the-century and Depression-era Little Italy, was beautiful. I noticed all of the little store fronts and details inside the grocery store in which Vito worked and contrasted those details with the 50s-era post-modern decor in Michael's Nevada compound. It was all just very well done.
The whole movie feels like an opera, minus the singing, and I think that's why people are more inclined to call the sequel better. I call the sequel "as good as the first," because it's like comparing apples to oranges, really. The first Godfather is about moral ambiguity and how riding the fence is not the same as simply doing what's right. It's the portrait of a man and his family, as well as the study of a son's devotion to his father, at the expense of his innocence, and it's far less dark than the second. The second film is about moral degradation - how riding the fence actually leads to falling off the fence entirely and the consequences of doing so and how making bad choices can lead to a dangerously slippery slope and self-ruination. The two films taken together chronicle the spiritual fall of the son, so, for me, it's hard to separate them and compare. I like them both equally for different reasons.
This is just a cheeky aside, but have you ever noticed that the story here and the overall story in the original Star Wars films feel very similar, with the exception that Luke Skywalker, the prodigal son in the latter, doesn't choose the dark side of the Force while Michael does? Ok, that might be a stretch, but in my analysis, it's hard to deny the similarities, though George Lucas and Francis Coppola have been longtime friends.
In any event, The Godfather Part II is a powerful film, as great as its predecessor, because it's comprised of the same great elements that worked so well with the first film. Now, at some point, I'm going to break down and watch the third part, and see if it's as bad as everyone says it is. I have a feeling that they probably just waited too long to make it - we'll see what I think in the end.