Summary
After the party, we find Michael in his room settling in for the night. He admires a picture one of his children drew for him while Kay lies in bed. It's the last moment of domestic bliss will see in the film. Kay asks why the drapes are open, and Michael stares at the window confused until gunshots start ringing. Suddenly there's a hale of gunfire, and Michael and Kay take cover on the floor. The room is full of smoke, but they're unharmed. Quickly, guards mobilize around the property to find the shooter. As everyone sits in the living room, bundled up in blankets and shaken, Michael and Kay exchange an icy glance.
Michael meets with his consigliere Tom Hagen and tells him that he considers him a brother and is trusting him to run the family business for the time being. He gives Tom power over everyone in the organization and entrusts him with care of Kay and the kids. Outside, two bodies are in a stream with their throats slashed—likely the men who tried and failed to kill Michael. When it comes time to pull the bodies out, Michael has already disappeared, and it's Tom who issues the command. Michael has gone to say goodbye to his son Anthony, saying he has to go away on business. Anthony says he could help his father. On that note, Michael kisses his head and leaves.
We flash back to 1917, where we see Vito with his wife and an infant in their apartment. Vito goes off with a friend of his to see an Italian-language vaudeville show, and go backstage so that the friend can flirt with the leading lady in the show. What they find is a mob boss shaking down the theater owner. This is Don Fanucci, associated with the Black Hand gang. Vito clearly doesn't like what he sees. Back home, Vito hears a man shouting from across the alley, and when he opens his window to see what the ruckus is, gets tossed a cloth bag full of guns. He hides them like the man asks.
The next day, Don Fanucci walks into the deli where Vito works and demands that the owner give his nephew a job. The shop owner is therefore forced to fire Vito, but Vito is grateful for the caring his boss has shown him since he arrived to America, and parts gracefully. When the shop owner tries to give Vito a box of produce, Vito refuses. Vito then meets with the man who tossed him the gun, and the man insists on giving Vito a rug. They break into the fancy townhouse of someone who owes the man money and steal a rug, which just barely fits in Vito's small apartment.
Back in the present, Michael travels to Miami to meet with Hyman Roth at his modest home. There, Michael tells Roth that Frank Pantangeli wanted permission to kill the Rosato Brothers, and that he believes Frank tried to kill him after he refused the request. Michael checks with Roth to make sure that it's alright if he has Frank killed, and to ensure that the casino deal they're working on is still on track. He then travels to Frank Pantangeli's home—the house he used to live in as a boy—to tell Pantangeli to squash his beef with the Rosato brothers. When Frank demands to know why, Michael says it's because he wants Roth to think their relationship is good while he searches for the person in his family who betrayed him, implying that someone in the family worked with Roth to have him killed.
Fredo gets a call late at night from a man named Johnny who wants Fredo to see if the deal Frank Pantangeli is setting up with the Rosato brothers is legitimate or if Frank is going to bring men with him to start a fight. Fredo says he wants no part of it, saying that Johnny's people lied to him and he doesn't want to speak to them ever again. The man tries to reason with Fredo but he hangs up. We now know Fredo was the one who helped to coordinate Michael's shooting.
We see Frank go to a bar to meet the Rosatos, but before long someone is strangling him with a wire and says "Michael Corleone says hello." The hit is botched when a cop walks into the bar, sending everyone scrambling and starting a gunfight that spills out onto the street. Frank survives. This is when things start to get confusing. Did Michael order the hit? Was he lying about Hyman Roth's involvement in his attempted murder? Who was strangling Frank Pantangeli?
Analysis
Perhaps the ultimate genius of The Godfather: Part II is its juxtaposition of two totally separate narratives about the Corleone family, both woven around some key themes. Both the story of Michael Corleone trying to build a legitimate casino business while searching for the traitor in his inner circle in the 1950s, and the story about the young Vito Corleone breaking into the New York mafia in the 1910s, involve meditations on familial obligations, loyalty and betrayal, and the American dream. But what makes this juxtaposition so powerful is how the stories are presented as two sides of a coin. While Vito stakes out a humble family life in a tiny Manhattan apartment, Michael is leaving his family alone in Nevada to take care of business. While Vito cobbles a life together for himself, finding the ins and outs of America's status as land of opportunity, Michael is discovering the headaches that come from running with the big dogs.
It's likely intentional that this is also the portion of the film when mafia business gets conducted in an old school way. No matter how much Michael wants to push the family business into legitimacy, he has to deal with botched hits, shootouts, and trips to Miami to do business with the Jewish mob. We learn through all of this that the Corleone family that Michael leads has many of the same concerns as the one his father lead, and that the only real difference is the scale Michael operates on. While we watch Vito deal with small-time nepotism and stashing guns for a stranger, we watch Michael try to coordinate multi-million dollar deals.
One of the most fun aspects of the Vito storyline is Coppola's uncanny use of pastiche. Robert De Niro, one of the luminary actors of the period, is effectively tapped to perform a Marlon Brando impression when he takes on the role of Vito, played by the older actor in the first Godfather film. This creates a bizarre sense of deja vu around one of the most iconic roles in American film history. The film would ultimately contribute to De Niro's breaking out as one of the stars of his generation, and it may well be this credible claim to sharing a lineage with Marlon Brando that did it for him.
Likewise, Coppola employs odd allusions to the silent film of the 1910s, an era when American narrative filmmaking was coming into its own. We have the durational wide shots that depict the action in the vaudeville show Vito and his friend go to see, a nod to the stationary camera and theater-like presentation of early silent film. But just a few scenes later, Coppola offers us some framing that seems straight from a film by D.W. Griffith, one of the early pioneers of camera technique, with that fantastic shot of the gangster edging up to the doorway of the mansion with his gun drawn while a police officer knocks on the door. With this film, we constantly get the sense that the past is very much alive.
