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tells us what we already know. Unfortunately, as Michael Corleone grows
older he becomes another of those familiar, semi-mythological American
bastards, an obscenely rich and completely lonely man of great power. This is
no surprise and not terribly interesting. The notion that extreme success in
America isolates you from everything worth striving for is now too complacent
and banal an
apercu
to sustain the grandiose and solemn treatment it gets
here . IfPuzo and Coppola aren 't going to turn Michael into an entertaining
grotesque , couldn 't they develop him, open him up a bit? Poor Al Pacino ,
locked in an unyielding, inarticulate funk, stares and stares and becomes a
bore-of baffling intensity, but a bore nonetheless. The final scenes, with
Michael brooding over his darkened blue lake while memories of the family
he's decimated torture his mind , resound with the hollow certainty of an irony
too easily achieved . In Part One Coppola escaped from those moralists who
wanted the Corleones to be
unhappy ,
but now he's succumbed .
Still, despite all one 's dissatisfactions, Coppola appears
to
be a uniquely
central and powerful American talent . His feeling for American surfaces-the
glancing intimations ofsocial status in gesture, tone of voice, decor , clothes–
is as precise as any director's in American film history. Perhaps one has to cite
John O'Hara for the proper comparison, but Coppola is more playful. His
showpiece big party scene near the beginning of Part Two, an obvious con–
trastwith Part One's wedding celebration, depends on observation so acute it
becomes a form of malicious wit. The Corleones have charged into the Amer–
ican center by the late fifties, and they've paid the price in blandness : their
lakeside bash is a ceremonial drag, more like a TV variety show than a party ;
the hearty Italian street music has been replaced by a suave-sounding dance
band and a blond cherub 's chorus , the natural gaiety by a desperate desire to
have fun. Having moved the base of their operations from Long Island to Lake
Tahoe , they 've fallen in with western WASPs, or at least the dissolute re–
mainders of a WASP ruling class-a pious, hollow-voiced senator (played by
G.D. Spradlin as a degenerate combination of Edward Gurney and Ed
Sullivan) and blond playmates for brother Fredo and sister Connie (Connie's
lover, in a cruelly symbolic casting stroke, is acted by the washed-up juvenile
Troy Donahue). Coppola rarely emphasizes this sort of thing ; he depends on
our memories, our powers of observation, and our willingness to make con–
nections without having them spelled out. When Michael visits Hyman Roth ,
the millionaire Jewish gangster with the middle-class family life style, the
hilarious mediocrity of Roth's Miami home-pale yellow walls and wicker
furniture , darkened little TV room , recessive wife serving lunch on a portable
table-is so eloquently expressive of the habitual practice of fraud that one is
convinced that realism is not only the most natural but the most magical of
cinematic modes.
