The Godfather II

Projected in a theater, a film image is unignorable. Similarly, the sound accompanying that image has an authority and presence that real life's acoustic muddle can't match. Even films featuring overlapping dialogue present each strand of the conversation with a clarity that actual experience can't match. We listen to a movie like Robert Altman's "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" astounded that we can decipher so many different and separate layers of speech -- it is like attending to a Bach fugue. Recently, Austin's Paramount Theater showed Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather II" on a reasonably sized screen,image-sourced from a DVD projected by the kind of apparatus that you see sometimes deployed in bars for the display of sporting events. The pictures were underlit, dim and indistinct. The sound was muddy and the dialogue mostly indecipherable. Worse, the film, as shown in the old theater,wasn't a spectacle of "son et lumiere" but rather something that could very easily be ignored. In that setting,the movie seemed remote, faded, a sort of melancholy compilation of itself and, since the auditorium was not really as dark as it should be, the movie was merely a distraction, a disconnected phenomenon occurring at the front of shadowy room... Accordingly, my comments on the film's substantive merits must be considered in the context of a screening that unfortunately disfigured the movie presented.

I haven't seen "Godfather II" in one continuous sitting for more than 30 years. I recall that the film disappointed me when I saw it as a young man: A film about a hollow man, it seemed to me slightly vacuous itself, an operatic spectacle that, despite its pretensions, rested upon a fairly arbitrary and puny theme: it's bad to assassinate people, particularly family members. These reservations were revived by my recent viewing of the picture. Certainly, "Godfather II" is massively impressive, ambitious, and ornate -- it is the "Intolerance" of gangster pictures, the distention, as it were of a low-budget, tawdry form of B-picture entertainment into a vast and expensive epic. You admire the picture far more than you enjoy it. There are several reasons for this. First, and most obviously, Al Pacino's fantastically restrained performance as Michael Corleone creates a void at the center of the movie; Pacino's "Godfather" is so emotionally strangled, so still and abstractly menacing as to impart a funereal gloom to the entire enterprise. (Certainly, Pacino's feral over-acting for Brian DePalma in "Scarface" was some sort of reaction to the strait-jacket imposed on the ordinarily exuberant actor in this film.) Pacino's Michael Corleone is filmed like a handsome Renaissance prince, but he doesn't seem to be having any fun at all. As a result, the audience's enthusiasm for the film is dampened: I understand this to be an aesthetic decision and one that must be respected, but it imparts an icy chill to the picture. (Similarly, Robert DeNiro's peformance as the young Vito Corleone in the parallel prequel story is also fantastically restrained, taciturn, understated -- even when he's murdering someone, Vito doesn't seem to be having any fun.) The second difficulty that the film poses is that Coppola imposes a foreign European aesthetic on what is essentially an rat-a-tat-tat American genre. The editing and glamorous photography slows to funereal pace a movie that is founded, at its heart, on the old Warner Brothers "school of velocity" fantasy. Gangster movies, even sophisticated ones like Scorsese's pictures, involve wish-fulfillment -- they are typically full of fast cars, tough-talking dames wandering around in silk lingerie, Tommy guns blazing at the screen, men in flashy suits flashing fat, greasy wads of money. But Coppola's masters are the great Italian directors Luchino Visconti and Bernardo Bertolucci -- these men are aristocrats of the cinema and their films are full of elegant images so self-consciously beautiful that the picture has to stop dead in its tracks to contemplate its own sheer gorgeousness. Coppola's DP,Gordon Willis adapts Bertolucci's fantastic sense for the contrast between indoors and outdoors -- both "The Conformist" (1970) and "Last Tango in Paris" (1972) contain extraordinary images of dimly lit, fashionably appointed interiors contrasted with steely ice-grey exteriors -- and designs "Godfather II's" imagery to embody those kinds of contrasts. Willis seems to be competing with Vittorio Storare, the great Italian cameraman who shot Bertolucci's films; he wants to show that he also can film on the very verge of visibility, interiors that are so dark as to show nothing but a few Rembrandt-lit rims of faces, the glint of an eye, a crucifix on the wall, contrasted with the blaze of sunlight outside or the blue, glacial white of snow surrounding the bright void of Lake Tahoe. Coppola adapts his spectacular scenes from Sergio Leone, particularly "Once upon a Time in the West" (1968) and his camera tracks relentlessly across acres of period sets crammed with carefully authentic-looking extras -- there are enormous shots of the lower East Side teeming with immigrants, riots in the slums of Havana, religious processions on Mott Street, even party scenes with hundreds, even thousands of actors. But Leone's tracking shots were usually accompanied by a swoon of music and had some kind of a point other than merely showing-off. Consider, for instance, the scene in which Claudia Cardinale gets off the train to meet her new husband in "Once upon a Time in the West" -- the camera tracks among hundreds of extras, but, then, in a breathtaking crane shot rises up above the crowd to film beyond the hissing, steaming train to show the huge landscape of the American west, the tiny town, the buttes and mesas and desert; the sense is that the actress is now a tiny figure in a huge landscape and that this exhilarating camera-effect captures her awe, her sense of insignificance, and her excitement at coming to this new place. Coppola uses a similar effect in the Ellis Island sequence in "Godfather II" -- he tracks away from little Vito moving laterally across the great floor of the Ellis Island processing center, a camera motion that shows hundreds of people of all races standing in lines and engaged in various activities. It's a wonderful shot and feels fantastically authentic -- but it's fundamentally pointless and doesn't have the soaring impact of Leone's airborne crane-shot flourish. Coppola's other master is the great Francesco Rosi, particularly his seminal Mafia picture from 1962, "Salvatore Giuliana" -- the scenes involving the congressional inquiry clearly derive from that film's trial sequences. The Italian sense of operatic imagery, ritualized camera motion, and sheer opulence (particularly noteworthy in a historical epic like Visconti's "The Leopard" from 1962)provides Coppola with his pictorial vocabulary -- and one must question whether these models are exactly suited to what is essentially a fast and dirty American genre film. These reservations aside, the film is exquisite on many levels. The pictorial design contrasting the tomb-like, tenebrous interiors and sun-dappled outside shots is so thorough-going as to be obsessive, but it results in splendid effects. In some shots, Willis contrives to have both sepulchral darkness and brightness in one frame -- I am thinking particularly of the late monochromatic sequence in which Michael interrogates the feckless Alfredo in front of a huge glass window that opens onto a grey snowy landscape: the characters are menacing black silhouettes against the snow outside the house. Further, the film's contrast between light and dark applies to entire sequences: if New York and Lake Tahoe are dimly lit interiors, Havana and Sicily are depicted as bright exterior spaces. There are many iconic and memorable lines, most famously: "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer." When the Jewish mobster, Hyman Roth refuses to lament over some murderous transaction and says: "We're men. This is the business we've chosen," the character, momentarily assumes a certain lethal grandeur. The scene in which Diane Keaton confesses have aborted Michael's son has a horrible primordial power, mostly because Pacino is so terrifyingly self-contained and silent. Coppola and Willis' compositions are masterful -- he rarely uses close-ups and most of his shots are groups of four to eight men, gathered in an ominous colloqy in a shallow dark space; these images have an enormous authority. Furthermore, the modulation between the past (prequel) and present scenes is subtle, almost Proustian, and there are exceedingly intricate thematic echoes and contrasts and reflections between the two layers of the narrative. (Coppola was going to cut all the Godfather films into one sequential narrative -- this would have been idiotic; one of the pleasures of "Godfather II" is the way that the past and present seem to merge in a kind of monumental reverie.) There is no doubt that the film is great, a kind of towering folly that presages the even more colossal insanity of "Apocalypse Now" and, perhaps, Coppola's last great film, his hallucinogenic "Dracula."