If I had had a blog at the time, I would raked myself over the coals for what I'm about to tell you.But my first viewing of The Godfather Part II came about six months before I started documenting my movie thoughts on The Audient. That was June of 2008. I was 34 at the time, so that was already pretty late in the viewing career of a cinephile like me to be seeing this movie for the first time.
To correct the long-time oversight, and to watch the infamous third movie in the series for the first time as well, my wife and I planned a themed viewing weekend. We watched The Godfather (which we'd both already seen) on Friday night with a pasta dish one of us made. We watched its sequel (which she hadn't seen either) on Saturday night with a pasta dish made by the other. And we watched The Godfather Part III on Sunday night with delivery pizza. I hope it was bad delivery pizza, so that the quality of the dinners mirrored the quality of the movies.
Except we screwed up watching the second movie. And we screwed it up in a way that, it appears, I've never revealed on this blog in 11 and a half years of its existence, despite it being a great story and despite my confessional nature.
We watched the second disc first.
How is this possible, you ask? How can you start a movie two hours into its running time and not realize that this is what had happened?
It still seems incredible today, but I'll try to set the scene.
I can't blame having too much wine, I guess, since I think we ate while watching the movie. Unless I dipped into it before we started, but that wouldn't have been like me. If I knew I had three hours and 20 minutes of movie ahead of me, I would have known I couldn't stack the deck against myself with too much alcohol -- even at the comparatively vigorous age of 34.
So I guess, when disc 2 went into the DVD player rather than disc 1, we must have both thought the apparent abruptness to the start of the movie was just a strange, minimalist intro into the action. The Lake Tahoe setting was not a carryover from the first movie, so starting in winter, rather than at the outdoor festival where the movie actually starts, was only a little stranger than what I would have otherwise experienced.
The weird part is that we did not, after about 20 minutes, decide that something was wrong. We watched all the way until the closing credits, which came at about an hour and ten minutes of disc 2. Again, some of this material might have struck us as more befitting of the second half of a movie than its first. But we also knew this was a beloved film, and beloved films are often rule-breakers. Maybe the apparent disorientation of it was part of its greatness.
Once we realized what had happened, we shook our heads, smacked our foreheads, and started over at the beginning.
It was possible to recognize The Godfather Part II as quite an achievement even when viewing it out of sequence. In fact, given that it takes place in two different time periods, you could say it's out of sequence to begin with, in a manner of speaking.
However, the fact that I didn't love it -- just as I still don't love The Godfather after two viewings -- would probably continue to nag at me. It meant I could never be sure whether the strange circumstances of my first viewing played a significant role in my feelings about the movie, or whether the Godfather movies were just never going to be special favorites of mine.
Never, that is, until I budgeted that three hours and 20 minutes again, to give it another shot.
It took a dozen years, but it finally happened on Sunday.
The occasion was that they have started to ease some pandemic restrictions here in the great state of Victoria. The national COVID death toll is still under 100 -- sitting at 99 today, out of a 25.5 million population -- so we are cautiously putting our toes back in the water of social interaction. My sister-in-law was excited to take the kids for the day. It would have been an overnight, but that is not yet part of the permitted activities. (I don't understand what coronavirus you can get from an overnight visit that you couldn't get from a five-minute interaction, but I'm also not a scientist.)
It was a beautiful day, but I had already expended my outdoor activity on a 45-minute run. Which left me without the energy or the desire to bask in the increasingly less regular sunshine as we head into winter.
Couch? Yes.
In fact, I had specifically decided that I intended to watch something long, something I couldn't take down on an ordinary weeknight, but didn't initially have a candidate in mind. Then I remembered The Godfather II, still sitting in a flip folder among all the other discs I brought with me from America back in 2013. Only the next day I would discover it was available for streaming on Stan, but there seemed something correct about watching the same two DVDs that had flummoxed me 12 years ago.
Thoughts? I thought you'd never ask.
I get why everyone loves this movie without still fully loving it myself. I'll try to articulate my complaints, even if some are minor.
1) I'm not sure how well the two narratives speak to each other, nor how well they are interspersed with one another. Although I am not privy to the thinking of Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo at the time -- though I could probably get so on the internet if I wanted -- it strikes me that the decision to tell a prequel story about the deceased Vito Corleone grew out of the belief that he was the most interesting character in these movies, and a sequel could not survive without his presence. It seems like the better reason to include such a story is to show how he bequeathed his own traits as a mob boss to his son, Michael, and his story does sort of accomplish that. But maybe I needed the comparison to be more on the nose, as I don't really see that much in Michael that reminds me of Vito, and vice versa. I also felt that Vito's story was abandoned for really long stretches of time, sometimes as long as 45 minutes. So while I like and am engaged by both stories, they feel more like two movies smashed together than stories that demanded to be told in the same 200-minute package.
A funny thing did occur to me, though, and it gets at something universal about the impulse to tell a prequel story about a beloved character. Vito Corleone gets his surname because an Ellis Island immigration officer misreads his documents, believing Corleone to be his name rather than his region of origin in Italy. I couldn't help but think of a similar scene in a movie that came nearly 45 years later, as the young Han Solo gets his own surname as a result of an imperial officer assigning it to him. Fan service was a thing even back in 1974, though I'm sure none of the people involved would characterize it that way.
2) If the movie was really 200 minutes long, why is there so little room for Diane Keaton's Kay? If memory serves, she's a far more significant character in the original Godfather, but she's really sidelined here. I may be using Martin Scorsese's gangster movies as a bit of an unfair gauge, but I don't see Goodfellas or Casino as the same movies if Karen (Lorraine Bracco) and Ginger (Sharon Stone) don't have plenty of screen time to impact the character arcs of the movies' male protagonists. Here, Kay gets an early scene to complain about not being able to leave the Lake Tahoe compound after the assassination attempt, and a later scene in which she gets to explain why she's leaving Michael. Although I remember from the original that the relationship started deteriorating from the end of that movie, I felt like it would have behoved Coppola to check in with her more regularly here, so her decision to leave would not feel so abrupt.
3) There's something about the movie's core conflicts that I still don't quite grok. Why did Hyman Roth want Michael out of the way? That is not clear to me. In fact, maybe I missed a bit of dialogue somewhere, but when he goes to visit Roth, it seems to me that he believes Frank Pentangeli was responsible for the assassination attempt. In fact, either he knows Roth's involvement and is playing Roth in that scene, or he learns it later, but then if it's the latter, the moment he learns it does not come as the kind of revelation I was expecting. I was also unclear about why he flies Fredo to Cuba with a briefcase containing $2 million, only to not give it to Roth -- even though, if my memory of a movie I saw two days ago serves, he does not discover Fredo's involvement until after he decides not to give the briefcase to Roth. What changed his mind?
Some of these questions might be able to be answered within the text, but even when paying full attention in the middle of a Sunday afternoon -- pausing to nap at one point, but not missing any of the action -- I couldn't get what I thought were solid answers. I can't fully give myself over to a movie if I've still got nagging complaints like these ones.
I guess there's also something about this movie that does not make it "seem like a Godfather movie." I know that's a weird thing to suggest when there had only been one other. But I felt like the New York settings of the original seem more true to what I think of as "a Godfather movie" than the Lake Tahoe and Cuba settings.
So yeah, I think I do like the original better, but since I have similar reservations about the original, this may just not be my series. It's not heresy to like the original better than the sequel, but having the reservations I have about both of them probably is.
I will say that the end of the second movie left my longing to again watch the third, even knowing how bad it is, since the end of Godfather II so clearly feels like a pause rather than an ending. It also made me wonder why there was such a long delay between the second and the third.
Well, it too is streaming on Stan, so I might have my chance -- if I really want it.
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