being strong
by Douglas Messerli
Francis
Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo (screenplay, based on the book by Mario Puzo),
Francis For Coppola (director) Godfather
II / 1974
There
is a horrible moment early in The
Godfather II when Michael Corleone’s (Al Pacino) young son, Anthony,
celebrating the day of his first mass—and after being almost literally
swallowed up in the festive events for people he does not even know—is kissed
goodbye by his mostly inattentive father. A conversation between the two
follows:
early tomorrow.
Anthony: Will you take me?
Michael: No. I can’t
Anthony: Why do you have to go?
Michael: Because I have to do business.
Anthony: I could help you.
Although
Michael suggests that someday the child will help him, we know, echoing as it
does with Michael’s earlier statement to his father, “I’m with you now,” by
film’s end we know that no one can “help” Michael. Although Anthony remains
living at the end of The Godfather II,
his father has ostracized him from his mother, Kay (Diane Keaton), murdered his
favorite uncle, Fredo (John Cazale), broken with his father’s gangland friends
from New York, and done in one of the giants of the Miami-Las Vegas underworld,
Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg). Michael’s mother, Carmela (Morgana King) has died,
and his sister, Connie (Talia) has had her life destroyed by his brother’s
various interventions “Michael, I hated you for so many years. I think that I
did things to myself, to hurt myself so that you’d know—that I could hurt
you.”). The adopted brother, Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall) has been painfully, for
him, demoted in the family operation. The bigoted and sleazy Nevada Senator Pat
Geary has been brought into Corleone control, while federal government
investigators attack. Despite Hyman Roth’s boastful statement earlier in the
film that he, the Corleone’s and others are now bigger in wealth that U.S.
Steel, Michael sits silently brooding at the end of this film as one of the
loneliest men ever portrayed in a moving picture. In his office at the empty
boat house, he is quite certainly sailing alone, with no one left to love him
or whom he might embrace.

Perhaps the most terrifying difference
between Vito’s world and Michael’s is connected with Hyman Roth, and the film
suggests that descent into the netherworld from the moment Michael leaves his
estate to visit the older man through Nino Rota’s descending chords and almost
slightly sickening melody.
Roth is portrayed as a childless man,
living in a quite ordinary bungalow in Miami, watching, like any elderly
retiree might, a baseball game (“I loved baseball ever since Arnold Rothstien
fixed the World Series in 1919). About his darkly lit rooms (utterly different
from every scene in the Corleone’s New York home), flutters his wife, attired a
bit like Mamie Eisenhower, in fluted ruffles; Roth turns up the television and
closes the door to maintain his privacy. Here love and loyalty are expressed in
phrases of passivity, as he recounts his long-time friendship with Moe Green,
whom Michael killed in the first installment of Coppola’s trilogy: “When I
heard it, I wasn’t angry; I knew Moe, I knew he was head-strong, talking loud,
saying stupid things. So when he turned up dead, I let it go. And I said to
myself, this is the business we’ve chosen.” Passionless, Roth has clearly made
a pact with the devil, living long beyond the age one might have expected; as
Michael quips earlier: “He’s been dying from the same heart attack for the last
twenty years.” Even Michael’s attempt to have him strangled in Cuba does not
kill him. Later, when Roth is homeless and unwanted by every country, Michael
suggests a hit on Roth when he attempts to return to the US:
Tom Hagen: It would be
like trying to kill the President; there’s
no way we can get
to him.
Michael Corleone: Tom,
you know you surprise me. If anything in
life is certain—if history has taught
us anything—it’s that you
can kill anybody.
Such
a philosophy might almost represent Roth’s own. But this time Michael succeeds,
destroying even the film’s Faust.

Perhaps, as Connie suggests, Michael has
just been attempting, all along to “be strong,” but in his involvement finally
with a man like Roth, he has taken the “family” as far away from the light—an
essential symbol of home and hearth Coppola has used throughout his great
works—as possibly could. Despite all the evils that may have existed in Vito’s
home, it is impossible to imagine him brooding in the dark, and, as we recall,
Vito Corleone died joyfully chasing his young grandson around the garden in a
children’s game. The frozen present Don could never have bent his body in that
way toward his son. No, Anthony, there is nothing you can do for your father;
he already one of the living-dead. Crime may have financially paid-off, but
there is no one there to collect.
Los Angeles,
October 25, 2012
This is great. I love it. Just watched the whole Godfather Epic yesterday, well, I started from 3 1/2 hours in because i've already seen the first Godfather. And i'm absolutely floored. It's so wonderful.
ReplyDeleteThe power of the loneliness of the ending, is an ending I would not have imagined, but it's perfect. It's true for the way he had acted since taking over, and represents the ultimate pay-off of having a disposition like his all those years.
Awesome article / essay.