You’d like to say Michael Corleone has his father’s eyes,
only you can’t really see his father’s eyes. Gordon Willis made sure of that.
But in this sequel-that’s-also-a-prequel you can see everyone’s eyes just fine,
and maybe that’s the most basic reason why the movie doesn’t seem as grandly
totemic to me as the original. Michael is precise, feline, then explosive in
spots – we see the machinations, the Michaelvellian moves, if you please, and
we see it all in his eyes, the windows to his ambition. But a fully-lit face means
there’s not the same sense of unknowable, melancholic danger in his presence as
there is in Brando’s. In the original, it’s the weight of that titanic, yet somehow
receding performance that keeps everything hairpin tense, even when he’s his own
mumbling version of docile and accommodating, or even when he’s nowhere near
the scene. What Michael can do is a sort of second-generation gravitas in that
Pacino way, show ‘em the whole iris over that ever-infuriated mouth, supremacy
channeled through the ends of his cigarette-clenched fingers – but pop had all
that in a stroke of his cheek. So that purr of quiet menace at the heart of the
tale is missing.
Part II makes up
for it partially with showier political complications (Senate hearings and
such), though doing so sacrifices more than a few layers of the hermetically
sealed world of the first part, where external players (Hollywood producers,
police chiefs) seem more like flies buzzing around Brando’s head. There’s a
less-cramped tone overall in II that, despite the sometimes pitch-dark
cinematography, makes the whole movie seem more sun-lit.
Another minus for me is in the prequel segments: we get to
watch DeNiro becoming Vito, but we
don’t get to see DeNiro be Vito. While
we see how his eye for justice meets a sociopathic business sense, killing the
former neighborhood don cause it’s the right thing to do, and how his streetwise
charm fills out that power vacuum, and while we know that young Vito’s lean and
wily charisma will eventually be absorbed into old Vito’s slow-motion, glad-handing
brand of power, we never actually see that crucial calcification on film, that
essential moment when DeNiro recedes into the darkness behind the desk… forgive
me, maybe even padded, LaMotta-like, silently waving in his next client.
Coppola went for subtle instead, but plug me in the forehead with a .38
special, I wanted to see that moment.
All that said, I’m not about to discount this movie. When
its only possible comparison is one of the greatest movies ever made, it’s
impossible not to find something
lacking. In fact, though, Part II is
done with such aggressive love and precision that anything happening inside of
it, melodramatic or mundane – the setting of a pear on a table, two men talking
about a rug over coffee, a group of mobsters eating cake – is exquisitely
engrossing. I found myself, most of the time, forgetting that I had to write
anything at all about it, and just got lost in the yellow-tinted tragedy of it
all.
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