I will never understand people who insist that the sequel is better than the original in the case of the Godfather movies. Don't get me wrong, The Godfather Part II is a well-made film with great performances that ultimately comes around to a central point, but it very much feels like it's made from the leftover parts of the original novel by Mario Puzo. There's a lack of cohesion to the film that puzzles me and keeps me at arm's length for most of the running time. The central point that I have to make, though, is that Michael Corleone's personal journey feels really truncated, especially in comparison to what he went through in the first film.

Michael (Al Pacino) has successfully moved the entire Corleone crime family from New York to a new base on Lake Tahoe on the Nevada side. The film opens with a large family gathering, this time his son's first communion. It's interesting to note that the first film definitely ended in 1955 (there are dates on gravestones), but this film takes place seven years afterwards and is only set in the years leading up to 1959 (the fall of Batista in Cuba). Anyway, that bit of retconning aside, we meet the new set of characters around Michael. We still have Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), Michael's adopted brother and chief counsel who has been pushed aside because he doesn't have the stomach for the more warlike stance of some of Michael's efforts, Kay (Diane Keaton), Michael's wife, Fredo (John Cazale), Michaels' older brother, and Connie (Talia Shire), Michael's sister. Into this come new characters like Senator Pat Geary (G. D. Spradlin) and Frank (Michael Gazzo), Clemenza's successor back in New York. It's the same kind of vast set of characters as the first film set out, but where the first film made a very clear connection between Michael's ascension to the family throne with the troubles the family was having overall, the story that Michael finds himself embroiled in is far less clear.

Essentially, Michael is doing business with Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg) in Miami, and someone tries to assassinate Michael the night of Little Vito's first communion. Was it the Senator? Was it Frank? Was it Roth? Well, Michael immediately figures it out, tries to play both sides against the middle, but that fails because someone tries to take out Frank and blame it on Michael. Essentially, the film isn't interested in this central mystery, immediately solves it, and just continues. I complain not because I dislike the film, but because I see this weird lost potential that gets tossed aside so easily. The Michael side of the story is the less focused of the two major parts of the film, but it does have a lot to recommend it anyway. The recreation of pre-Revolutionary Havana is great, when Michael goes there to make final arrangements around a hotel investiture with Roth, only to size him up followed by the fall of Batista.

The better part of the film is the stuff around young Vito (Robert de Niro) and his rise to power in the 1910s and 1920s New York City after he's sent there after his parents' murders by a Sicilian mob boss. He makes friends with the young Clemenza (Bruno Kirby) who shows him the ropes when he's a young man, and he takes out the local crime boss Don Fanucci (Gastone Moschin). This stuff is all around great, a portrait of a lost time and the rise of a young man who balances his priorities of respect, family, and power in a way that is a marked and intentional contrast to Michael's steady shedding of his family through his own pursuit of power. That's the real point of including the young Vito stuff, to draw that contrast, but because it's in service to Michaels' story, it makes it less important overall.

I think it's the point where Michael ends up being dragged before a Congressional hearing about organized crime that I wonder about the actual writing of the film. Senator Geary just leaves, leaving the blackmail information that Hagen got on him leading to little other than having one less antagonistic voice on a committee that Michael beats anyway by corrupting the chief witness. A lot of these pieces don't really seem to fit, but all of the pieces are wonderfully crafted individually. I'd say that, especially Michael's story, is something where the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Where my evaluation of the film moves from some distanced appreciation of the craft and aesthetics of the film to something more immediate and emotional is the final flashback that doesn't actually involve Vito (since Marlon Brando wanted too much money), showing us Michael, his isolation before he went off to war, and his innocence. It's a reminder of how far he's fallen by the end, and it works surprisingly well, though it almost feels like manipulation.

And this leads me to my central complaint with the film. Take away my issues with the lack of cohesiveness, and I'm left with Michael not really having much of an emotional journey in this film. He starts almost as far as he ends. How different is Michael at the end of the first film, where he has everyone against him murdered, up to and including his brother-in-law, and that's how he starts this film. He's a bad man. He's already fallen. How much further does he fall? Well, he has his screwup of a brother murdered. How far removed is that from having his screwup of a brother-in-law killed in the first film? Granted, Michael does seem to actually love Fredo despite Fredo's screwups, so it's a small move towards corruption and evil. Where this portrait really works is in contradistinction to the rise of Vito, and it makes me wish that the film had been more evenly split between the two stories.

So, one may read this review and look at my rating and wonder where the disconnect is. The simple fact of the matter is I really do kind of love this film. It's hugely expansive and every single individual piece is worthwhile. The film ultimately brings some central points together in ways that engages me, but there's simply too much that feels random in relation to what's going on around it and the final point that the film ultimately comes to. In comparison to the first film, an elegantly assembled singular piece of cinema that has every piece feeding its central point while supporting everything around it, the second entry in the Godfather series just doesn't stand up. It's a testament to Coppola's incredible talent as a cinematic craftsman that he gets so much of this film to work, but he made better this year in The Conversation.