The Godfather Part II (1974) - What makes a masterpiece?

At half a century (and rest assured, I'm choking - figuratively - as I type that), it's staggering how fresh Coppola's masterwork comes across. I'm relatively certain that I haven't seen it on the big screen the nineties and I haven't watched it all the way through since the early 00s. Seeing it in a crisp restoration for its fiftieth anniversary re-release was at once familiar and revelatory. 

The first revelation was something more like a corroboration of something Roger Ebert noticed on a DVD release many years ago; how much Nina Rota's score was a huge element in the narrative's execution. Usually, this would be a huge demerit from my perspective, but as Ebert pointed out (if memory serves, and I'm too lazy to go hunting), it's not as though Rota's composition was directing the audience what to feel, but that it reflected the interiority of what the characters were experiencing. 

No, more often than not, the tone of the soundtrack is mournful or elegiac. There is no background of strings or brass attempting to quicken the pace of the film or the pulse of the viewer; if anything, it's an aural counterpart to Gordon Willis's cinematography, dark, inky, and foreboding. Indeed, in the modern sequences as we see Michael grow increasingly monstrous and hollowed out, the music feels as though part of the shadows that surround Pacino as the film grows darker and darker, both literally and thematically. 

The early twentieth century flashbacks, by contrast, feel more lively, as we see Vito Corleone grow from a more or less typical immigrant to the man would become the head of one of the most powerful crime families in cinema. De Niro is all watchfulness and calculation but unlike his son, Vito is genuinely urged to grab power to protect his family and at least initially, the commoners at the mercy of Don Fanucci and the mobsters he works with. 

Did I say typical? Sorry, there's little enough that is typical; Vito's mother and father - actually, his entire family - is wiped out by Don Ciccio and Vito flees to America. It's these passages where the film feels oddly more alive and I don't know if it was Coppola's idea or not, but they read as such because we follow a younger, more driven man than Michael. Vito rises through calling in favors, through theft, through murder (Fanucci pays, getting gunned down by Robert De Niro in a sequence that presages the climax of Scorsese's Taxi Driver two years later...though considerably less bloody) and eventually returns to Sicily to avenge his family by killing Don Ciccio. 

By contrast, Michael is led by hubris, anger, and greed and eventually, is bored out like a log eaten away by termites. The ruthlessness that he showed in executing the heads of the other families at the denouement of The Godfather has metastasized into second nature here. When his wife Kay admits that she aborted the child they were expecting shortly after an attempt on their lives in the Corleone compound outside of Reno, she spells out how blind he is and frankly, how evil he's become. She won't bring another one of his children into the world.

What I've come to understand in my older years is that Coppola wasn't merely paralleling Michael and his father's lives; he wasn't even simply showing us a study in contrasts/similarities. He was clearly delineating the corrosive effects of power from different angles and that even if in one case, it appeared to be in the service of the underdog, any enterprise that operates where power is consolidated by the few or even by one above all is unlikely to secure anything remotely like beneficence. 

There's a scene late in the film when Corleone consigliere Tom Hagen visits Frank Pentangeli in federal prison and they reflect on how the families originally modeled themselves on the Roman Empire and how conspirators against the emperor would choose suicide in return for clemency for their families. Aside from this foreshadowing of Pentangeli's choosing to end his life, it feels very much as though Coppola and Puzo were underscoring just how vaunted the old guard saw themselves. Additionally, I suspect that the point was being driven home that political leaders very often are not so very different from the heads of criminal organizations in terms of their relationship to others below them and among themselves.

That both Godfather films posit this kind of twinning during the Nixon era should be lost on no one. The lesson still stands.

The second part of the series traffics in some of the best editing in any film. Some felt that the back and forth between the time periods was jarring and that it would have been better to have simply made two separate movies, but this misses the elegance and substance of what Coppola had achieved. There is a rhythm and a well considered plan of how each of the storylines run alongside and how the child is father to the man. 

Something else I appreciate more now than formerly is the dinner scene from December 7, 1941, Vito's birthday where we see Sonny, Fredo, Michael, Tom, and Connie (and Connie's then boyfriend) around the table waiting for their father to come home. Things get dodgy when Michael tells everyone that he joined the Marines despite the strings Vito pulled to secure his deferment. Sonny is angry, Tom perplexed, and only Fredo supports Michael in his decision. Michael makes it clear that fighting for his country is his choice and he feels the right thing to do, where Sonny thinks sticking your neck out for people you don't know is for fools. "That's pop talking", says Michael and Sonny says their father's right. This, despite a bellicose, self-righteous screed about the gall of the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. 

On the one hand, it's a scene that captures much of America in a nutshell but for the narrative's purpose, it paints in stark contrast the man that Michael was opposed to the man he has become. 

Watching this film so many years since I first saw it (when it came out) and for that matter, since I last watched it, I asked myself what are the elements that make this a masterpiece or indeed, any work of art a masterpiece?

There is a ready-made list to pull from; superlative writing, direction, performance. There's thematic resonance that doesn't overwhelm the narrative's structure. There's the score, the visuals, attention to period detail, and so on, but all of this is too easy. This is the kind of list that just reading it sounds canned.

A masterpiece is more than the sum of its parts; I'd even go so far as to say that a masterpiece can be one despite flaws. Are their flaws in The Godfather Part II? I think a case could be made that it borders on the almost unwieldy. There is a lot stuffed into the twin plots and it really does sometimes feel as though you're getting two movies for the price of one. But that's the beauty of Coppola during these years; he took big swings with these two films (and would take another with Apocalypse Now) and the ball left the park.

The Godfather Part I is more of a piece, more economical in its storytelling than its sequel, but the sequel opens up like a poisonous flower the bud that has grown from what's been planted. I used to be divided on which was the better film, but that's a kind of jejeune game. 

In 1977, Coppola edited both films into a chronological presentation that premiered on television. It pointed up just what a monumental achievement these films are and while I enjoyed it and it makes sense, it doesn't improve on the experience of seeing them separately, as they were originally composed. 

Composed; each film is operatic, symphonic. There's something of the Damnation of Faust that runs throughout them; Michael's soul and actually those of the rest of his brothers' are lost. Coppola may be among the very few auteurs who had the ability to render these selfish bastards tragic on a nearly Shakespearean scale. But he doesn't let us or them off the hook.

More than the first film, the second paints a detailed portrait of moral erosion that stems from the shoring up of an empire founded on murder, theft, extortion, and more. To the insiders, it was just business. To anyone else, it was organized crime, with an attendant cost of lives, and of a loss of humanity of the participants.

There are moments when we might begin to feel bad for Michael, but we pull back when we remember Kay's reminder to him that the business was going to be completely legitimate in five years but it was now seven. We don't buy for a minute that Michael is going to change as he tells her because by that point, he's only aware that he's losing everything that might have mattered to him.

Aside from Kay, maybe the only other person to feel for is Fredo. In one of his five film performances, John Cazale brought us a truly, deeply tragic figure; the runt of the litter, not smart, not capable, and passed over by everyone. He admits to Michael how angry he was at him; he tells Michael that being the older brother, it was humiliating to be taken care of by the younger. And of course, he didn't think that his machinations, his betrayal was going to result in an attempt on Michael's life. At that point, you begin to realize how difficult it is to see him as purely tragic, but the way Cazale plays him you really rather want to feel sorry for him.

That last is key to all the performance in the film. Each turn is nuanced, rich in emotional resonance, and altogether, almost too real. Yes, it is operatic, but never melodramatic. Even Connie doesn't come away clean. She's the antiphony to Kay; once she's made her declaration to Michael, Kay is out of the family, out of his life, out of - we're pretty certain, eventually if not at present - her children's lives. Connie comes in to support Michael and one wonders if it is because she fears him or could it be that she recognizes that absent Kay, the children are going to need someone to be there for them. 

Of course, some might say that not all masterpieces are created equal. That might very well be so; but the odiousness of comparison raises its head. How do you compare Citizen Kane to La Rêgle du Jeu to Rashomon? At the very least, we can credit Coppola with bringing into view a uniquely American tale at a time when the parallels with what was happening in the country would be remarked on at some length, but more importantly, he provided a new way of telling stories about those whose milieu is on the other side of the law; of how criminality and power are not so easily uncoupled; of how human, despite their cruelty and sociopathy, these people are.

But it's not just a genre that Coppola turned on its head (one could argue that Robert Penn got their first with Bonnie and Clyde); the two films and the latter more than the former pointed out a new approach to cinematic story-telling. There are echoes of The Godfather Part II in almost every other epic filmed since then. To be clear, it might not have been the first film to use interspersed flashbacks with a different or more contemporary period, but it might have been the first to do so with such command and power.

Random thoughts:

Geez, the performances. Over the years, I've come to appreciate more what Pacino was doing but I still feel that De Niro outshines just about everyone. I'd seen Bang the Drum Slowly, but it didn't register with me that this was that guy. It frankly just didn't. It's the utter stillness in his Vito that roots the film as surely as anything he does actively in his part of the movie.

Of course, it's not just De Niro; Pacino burns throughout and carries the modern scenes with a smoldering intensity and everyone around him rises to the occasion. Lee Strasberg, Talia Shire, Duvall (duh); is there anyone who didn't bring their A game to this? Diane Keaton is luminous and alive even when Michael smacks Kay after she declares she's leaving. There's no fear in her eyes when she sees him while visiting her children but you know that's the last time that's going to happen and you worry for Connie for having set the meeting up. 

Willis outdid himself on this. It's insanity that he was only nominated twice by the Academy. See also his work with Woody Allen (particularly Manhattan).