Astonishing, lush film

Rating: Null/10 (2 June 2004)

Godfather Part II is one of the real highlights of all film literature. Coppola manages to take a great original and somehow add to it in a way that elevates it from simply a good movie into true art.
The story of Michael Corleone is dramatic in that it explores very seriously some themes that, by comparison, the first film only touches upon. Sure, it explains that Michael had a strong chance to make something of himself very far away from his father, and that he threw it all away. But in Part II we finally see the real reason why Michael's path was doomed to failure: He and his father were very different men with very different lives.
The finality and veracity of that message is so effectively transmitted in film that it comes off looking like an adaptation of ancient Greek drama. And like Greek drama often does, Godfather II dramatizes a particular moral idea by taking it to extremes. The simple version of the message: Tradition itself is worthless. You can try to hold the same values from generation to generation, but times change and those values don't guide you through every new situation. Vito Corleone's experiences as a Sicilian immigrant to New York are one thing, but Michael learns some dramatically different lessons in Batista's exploited Cuba.
The storytelling is so great, and so effective with the cast (especially with regard to Robert de Niro's historical reconstruction), that you can almost feel yourself walking down the streets of the Lower East Side around the turn of the century, and the memories evoked seem to erupt from your own head rather than from the screen. Great script and an even better cast make this one a must-own for true movie fanatics.