“This is the business we chose.”

    The Godfather is one of the greatest American films by an almost unanimous consensus. Marlon Brando’s staggering performance. Mario Puzo’s wonderful adaptation. And of course, Francis Ford Coppola’s operatic direction. To sum up The Godfather, it is a story of family—the rise and fall, the dynamics, and the story of closed doors. We are let into a world that is truly unknown to us. This is not what The Godfather: Part II is about. Instead, Part II is the entire story of America.

    There is one question that drives The Godfather: Part II, which is fueled by its dual narratives that flash back and forward: Why is Michael so different from Vito? Michael, played in a brutally cold performance by Al Pacino, takes over the family business and continues to redefine the lines of business and family. And instead of brining back Brando, Robert De Niro takes the role of a young Vito and his first adventures into America. One is the rise of capitalist expansion. One is the tale of immigration. This is no longer the closed story.

    But The Godfather: Part II, as masterfully constructed it is, cannot survive without The Godfather to precede it, because of the parallels it often draws. Consider the opening scene with Michael’s party for his son’s first communion. The relation is obviously to Connie’s wedding in the first film, but Coppola, directing once again from an adaptation he and Puzo wrote, subverts to show how little Michael cares about family and secrecy. The photo he takes with the senator is all for show. The band knows none of the classic Sicilian music. Michael keeps his window open, showing he is letting outsiders in, something that Vito would never do.

    Michael is different because unlike Vito, he is a true American, driven by capitalist gain.  The gangster film has always been about a parallel to financial American dreams. The classic 30s gangster films—Scarface, The Public Enemy, Little Caesar—are all about paralleling the reach for the American dream with a story of corruption and crime. While The Godfather avoids this, The Godfather: Part II brilliantly explores this dynamic in a way those films never could accomplish. Michael betrays family and friends for outsiders like the Jewish broker Hyman Roth. Roth takes Michael to Cuba to invest his funds, and in one scene Michael sits at a long table with the CEOs with a number of legitimate American businesses. The scene parallels the meeting of the Five Families in The Godfather, but shows that Michael has moved out of the immigrant story and into the American world.

    But as Coppola and Puzo explores, family is sometimes the only thing worth trusting. That is why young Vito’s beautiful story is there as well. It works as a moral compass, even if it is an illegitimate compass. Not only does Coppola show all the tricks that made Vito who he is (the first time he receives guns, he closes the door on his wife, something often repeated between the male and female spaces in both films), but he shows a man who cannot understand the American way of business. He hates the fact that America is the way it is—a world about money. That is why he bullies the rent owner into letting the old woman stay in her apartment—it may not be right because she owes money, but she deserves respect as an elderly. In Vito’s story, family and tradition come first. The final scene—after Vito brutally murders the boss of his Lower East Side village—brings Vito back to his family and kids. Coppola captures them in tableaux, sitting on their stoop, in their perfect American life.

    Which is why Michael fails, though it is not only him but his family that he corrupts. Fredo is willing to sell his brother out, for his own shot at power. But Michael even thinks he owns everything. During the climatic confrontation between Michael and his wife, Michael yells, “you won’t take my children!” He demands ownership more than family life. He suppresses morals in an attempt to covet what he can get. Only Frankie Petrangeli understands the old way of life, and is able to take the ultimate sacrifice—but even though he does it for family, Michael still understands it in a sense of monetary safety.

    There is something so different about Michael’s story though, not only thematically and through its narrative, but how Coppola approaches his style. He turns it down, relies less on Nino Rota’s haunting score, and keeps more often in muted scenes. When Kay tries to see her children, Coppola refrains from fast-paced editing and operatic sounds, instead relying on a slow steady shot and a simple door shutting. And in the final climax, an homage to the murder of the Five Families, he keeps it simple—two one man murders and a suicide, and the music stays almost silent.

    Back to the guiding question—why is Michael so different from Vito? Well why is the American experience so different from the immigrant experience. When young little Vito comes to America, Coppola establishes him as one of millions, not one rising above all else. Michael and his grab for power does become an individual. But consider the final scene—a young Michael explains to his brothers his plan to join the military and fight in the Second World War. Michael sees it as his patriotic duty to pay his dues to his country, while his brothers only understand the family business. The film then ends on Michael sitting alone at his Lake Tahoe estate, his eyes frozen to black, cutting the whole of himself off for a little more power, a little more money. His humanity is shattered by his actions, but as Coppola suggests, maybe it is not just his story, but the story of all Americans corrupted by power.