#15: The Godfather, Part II

The Godfather: Part II (Coppola, 1974)

This one I haven't seen since I first saw it about ten years ago, in my first short lived attempt to get into classic film. (Back before the internet reduced the cost of movie rentals from $8/rental to $9/month, and my only source of income was allowance.) So, I had little or no memory of it and probably no residual understanding of what was really going on. The plot of Godfather II is interesting as it constitutes a study of game theory. Michael does what's in his best interest, assuming everybody else does what's in their best interest. He doesn't trust what people tell him: He trusts them to be greedy. That's how he knows Hyman Roth is lying to him, and that's how he knows Fredo was setting him up. The problem is, Michael is a gangster, so the game theory solution to every problem is to kill everyone. This makes the story a little bit predictable and kind of boring. In the first Godfather there's the genuine question of whether Michael is really capable of murder, and of how far he'll really go into the criminal life he resisted up to the point of his father's shooting to protect his family. In the sequel there's no question: We know he's capable of murder and that there are no boundaries to that capability.

More interesting than the present are the flashbacks to the past where Robert Deniro portrays Vito Corleone before he became the Godfather. As a child his father was murdered by an Italian gangster, and then the rest of his family. Don Ciccio insisted on killing Vito, because despite his mother's claim to the contrary, he knew Vito would one day come looking for revenge. (He was right.) Vito escapes to America, where they change his last name from Andolini to Corleone (The town where he was born) at Ellis Island because it sounds more American. We see a process of allowing immigrants to come over but trying to forcefully assimilate them before accepting them. We then see him first meeting the old men from the first Godfather and forming a criminal enterprise as a statement of pride and independence, all leading up to his first murder, of a local gangster trying to charge them for the right to do business in his territory, and then his belated revenge.

That part, however, only constitues about a third of the movie. The rest of the movie focuses on Michael's rather redundant attempt to make the Corleone family business legitimate. He's doing business with and protecting a businessman in order to own a large part of the casino business in Havana. This all happens during the communist takeover of Cuba. He pinned all his hope of becoming legitimate onto Hyman Roth, then found out Hyman was just as criminal as he was, forcing him to go on a killing spree just to defend himself.

Michael was drawn into the mob to protect his father from assassination. Then once in the mob, his actions to defend himself from other mobsters ended up destroying his family. This is the thesis of the film, and it's one I don't accept. I don't accept the mythology of gangster movies that a decent person could become a mass murderer out of circumstance. If Michael could become a murderer, I believe that's what he always was, even before he had murdered.

Rating: **** 1/2 / 5

85/100

Next: L'aventura, then random die roll the rest of the way.

One of the reason my update rate slowed way down from the start of the year is that now, all I've got left is films I've already seen, and I'm trying to watch films for the Director's Cup on Mubi, which has taken up most of my movie watching time. But since I came this far I'm going to finish it, with the possible exception of Wizard of Oz. Maybe in lieu of Wizard of Oz I'll write about #101 The Man With A Movie Camera.