The Revenger's Tragedy

THE GODFATHER, PART II is both a sequel and a prequel, circling round the events of the original Godfather but leaving that tightly-knit, well-spun story--a film that kept everyone, critics and mass audience alike, on the edge of their seats--standing alone and untouched. Francis Ford Coppola's new movie is cut from the same cloth as Godfather I, but the pieces are arranged differently. It contains the same kinds of scenes--a sudden barrage of machine-gun fire rips open a quiet evening, the Don deals with his petitioners like a medieval monarch receiving his subjects--but they don't follow in a neat sequence. Instead, Coppola strings them out for more than three and a half hours and, although everything is wrapped up by the end, whole plot lines must be allowed to lapse lot as long as an hour.

What Coppola is attempting is a portrait of a world. The film has a warp in the story of young Vito Corleone and a woof in the story of his son Michael separated by about 30 years. Vito (Robert DeNiro) takes the first steps on the ascent from petty thief to capo di rutti capi in a series of flash-backs interspersed in the main action. Here, Michael (Al Pacino) has to deal with the legacy of his father--an extra-legal fiefdom doing business on a scale Exxon wouldn't sneeze at--and try to adapt it to changing times. If the film has anything to say about this, it is that he is imprisoned by his heritage. He marries an upper-class New England girl (played by Diane Keaton, who apparently hasn't learned how to act yet) and promises, at their wedding that "within five years the Corleone family will be entirely legitimate." This good intension founders on the distinction between the idea of a "family" as most of us know it--a more or less annoying collection of relatives--and "family" in the sense that the Corleone family is a dynasty possessing a private army, administering a state within a state. Michael has to make the choice, time after time, between these different families--his weak brother Fredo sets him up for a "hit," his wife gets an abortion rather than bear him a second son--and at the end he has achieved neither respectability nor happiness. His mother is dead, he has had his brother killed, his wife has left him, and the old-time lieutenants have departed in one way or another--he has nothing to live for except his business, and of course, his son.

Coppola is clearly at pains to make some of the points he made in The Godfather I again: that the underworld is a business organization; that there are ethnic divisions in it between Jewish mobsters in Miami Beach and Italian ones in Las Vegas; that the distaff side of the family is protected from the unpleasant side of the business; that everyone--including the Godfather--lives in constant danger of sudden death; that the protective function of the Sicilian mafia was not wholly lost in America. But he introduces some new themes as well: the struggle for legitimacy (Michael opens himself up to five counts of perjury by denying charges rather than take the fifth); the intimate connection with "legitimate" business ("United Telephone and Telegraph"); and a sense of history. An aging Mafioso committing suicide to save his family from further intimidation reminds himself of the tradition of ancient Roman emperors, who allowed unsuccessful rebels to commit suicide to avoid confiscation of their family estates.

WHAT UNITES everything, from the first frame of the film to the last, is the inexorability of revenge. Those who live by the sword may not always die by the sword (Marion Brando died of a heart attack in a tomato garden) but they are forced to go on living by the sword. Vito's father, we learn in the beginning of this film, was an honest man killed by a Sicilian don for refusing to be intimidated, twenty years later. Vito returns to draw an ugly line down the old man's belly with a stiletto. He has succumbed to the revenge ethic. The final five minutes of the film show three of Michael's closest associates dying by his command--his brother, his greatest rival partner and his oldest family retainer. But Vito's revenge was satisfying and to an extent just: Michael's leaves him empty and alone in his chateau on Lake Tahoe, not much more than a pawn in a long cycle of violence, that he will have to hand on to his son.

Neither of Coppola's two Godfathers could be accused of making the underworld life seem attractive, and Michael is even less romanticized than his father. Vito's world was a community where, if he walked down he street in New York's Little Italy, dapper old men and peasant-faced old women would how to him and kiss his hand. Even Michael's own lieutenants in New York would probably be unable to recognize him, his empire grown so large that his isolation at the top is unavoidable.

Like Michael, Coppola has bitten off more than he can chew. There are too many scenes and too many minutes in Godfather II for such a relatively straightforward story as it tells, and, while there are moments of suspense--when an ambush in a dimly lit New York bar explodes onto the street in a full-scale battle, when Michael's wife notices that the windows are open and a second later, burst after burst of gunfire destroys her bedroom--Coppola seems to have spent most of his energy on a few grand set pieces. The big party scene in Godfather I, when Vito's daughter is married, set the precedent for this emphasis and Coppola has created several new ones--Michael's son's first communion, the funeral of Vito's widow, Michael's appearance before a congressional committee, and, most bizarre of all, a long cloak, dagger and revolution sequence in pre-Castro Cuba.

Battista's apres-nous-le-deluge decade-long gangbang of imperialism provides the backdrop to the one point in his career where Michael seems on the verge of respectability. In partnership with Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg), he is about to transfer a large part of his wealth into more-or-less legitimate Cuban hotels and casinos. Along with executives of companies like United Fruit and "U.T.T." he goes to Havana to be honored by El President (whom U.T.T. presents with a solid gold telephone). But Michael's plans fall apart--Roth is really plotting his assassination, and in a weird, near-surrealist climax the Cuban President announces his resignation ("due to the success of the guerilla groups in the Guantanamo and Santiago areas") at his glittering New Year's Eve party. Hordes of men in tuxedos and women in long gowns spill out of the ballroom, down the marble steps of the collonnaded Presidential Palace, stampeding to the relative safety of the American Embassy compound. (Michael, of course, has his own chauffeur waiting to take him to his private plane). It only lasts for a moment, but the violence of the first confused stages of this revolution provide a glimpse of a different kind of violence than pervades the rest of the film--a violence of freedom instead of mutual destruction.

But usually Coppola is much less interested in the world at large and focuses solely on Michael. But Michael is a tough cookie, which means that Coppola is showing us someone essentially opaque. Pacino's two great emotional outbursts--when he realizes his own brother set him up for a hit and when his wife tells him of her abortion--come off as strained and unconvincing. We are given no reason to think of Michael as a feeling person to whom such things are more than business setbacks.

The Godfather II has the ring of authenticity about it. Its mafiosi mix well with the shadier elements of our government--string-tie western senators up to their ears in corruption, concupiscent executives of multinational corporations, opera buffa, Chiquita-banana-republic dictators. Perhaps the perspective is a strange one for most Americans, brought up on The FBI and The Untouchable--seeing the Mafia and the FBI as merely two competing organizations, more like Macy's and Gimbel's than good and evil. But The Godfather II is not a morally subversive movie--nobody would want to be Michael Corleone after seeing it, and no one would want to know him. It's just too dangerous, not worth the price.

LIKE HIS FATHER, Michael is a composite of several celebrated underworld figures--Frank Costello, Vito Genovese and Lucky Luciano. He lives in a world of fifties sleaze--of hideous Scandinavian modern furniture, immense Carmen Miranda style nightclubs, of two-tone deSotos and banana daiquiris. The older generation, at least, lived like old-fashioned Italian dons--eating good food, living in fine old houses, aspiring to a taste for literature and history. The younger generation is caught halfway between Scarsdale and Umberto's Clam House. Surprisingly, the movie Godfather II is closest to is The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz: two hard young men, both ethnic outsiders, lose their humanity in the struggle to gain and hold on to a dream of power, wealth and respectability, all against a background of the same two Americas--urban slums and the "open" land of resorts like Lake Tahoe.

In Coppola's view, Vito becomes a mafioso partly by accident and partly out of revenge for his family's destruction. But his film is not a study of the origins of the underworld. It doesn't tell us much about the underworld's organization, either, or about the bases of its power in a corrupt system, in a country whose basic premises of economic exploitation pass naturally, without a whimper, from the barely legal to the outright illegal. The Godfather II is like dynastic history--full of human interest, good gossip, and referring in passing to more important, underlying historical events. Visually it's a treat, and the understated performances of Pacino and Lee Strasberg are fine. But in the end it is a waste of time--did we really need three and a half hours of family squabbles, successful and unsuccessful "hits," elaborate flashbacks to Sicily and big deals in Havana, to be told--once again--that crime doesn't pay?