Word: coppolas
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...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...
...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...
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...
...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...