Michael Corleone¶

At a glance¶

Born: 1920, New York
Died: 1997, Sicily (Part III) — or simply outlives everything (Coda)
Played by: Al Pacino
Service: US Marine Corps, WWII — Navy Cross, Silver Star
Spouses: Apollonia Vitelli (1949, d. 1949); Kay Adams (1951, div. 1959)
Children: Anthony, Mary
Position: Don, Corleone family, 1955–1980
Oscar nominations: 2 — Supporting Actor (1973), Actor (1975). Won neither.

That's my family, Kay. It's not me. Michael, at his sister's wedding, 1945

The most complete portrait of moral collapse in American film — and the reason people keep coming back to a gangster picture from 1972.

The arc, in one line¶

He starts the trilogy as the only person in the family with a life outside it, and ends it as the only person in the family with nothing else.

Full breakdown: Michael's Arc.

Life¶

1920–1945. The youngest son, and the favored one. Vito's explicit plan is that Michael will be Senator Corleone, Governor Corleone — legitimate, clean, the family's exit into respectability. Michael enlists in the Marines on December 7, 1941, against his father's wishes and to Sonny's fury, and comes back decorated. He arrives at Connie's wedding in uniform, sits at a separate table, brings a girlfriend who is not Italian, and tells her the family business isn't his.

1945–1946. Vito is shot. Michael finds the hospital abandoned and, without a plan, moves his father's bed and bluffs the assassins away on the steps — the moment the film marks as his enlistment. When McCluskey breaks his jaw, he volunteers to kill both McCluskey and Sollozzo, and the family laughs at him.

He does it, and the film holds on his face in the restaurant for an extraordinarily long time before he moves.

1946–1948, Sicily. He walks the country his father fled, is struck by the thunderbolt, marries Apollonia, and watches her burn in a car bomb intended for him.

1948–1955. He returns, marries Kay, promises the family will be legitimate in five years, and takes control. At the baptism of his nephew he has the heads of the Five Families murdered and then lies to his wife's face — the only direct lie he tells her in the film.

1955–1959 (Part II). He moves the family to Nevada, buys senators, survives an assassination attempt in his own bedroom, discovers Fredo betrayed him, loses a son to Kay's abortion, destroys Hyman Roth, and has his brother killed on a lake while their mother is barely cold. He wins. There is nobody left to win against.

1959–1979. Twenty years the films skip. He divests from gambling, endows a foundation, and becomes rich in ways nobody can prosecute.

1979–1980 (Part III). He tries to buy absolution: a papal honor, a $600 million deal for the Vatican's holding company, a confession to a cardinal who will be Pope. He abdicates in favor of Vincent. On the steps of the Teatro Massimo an assassin's bullet meant for him kills his daughter.

1997. An old man, alone, in a chair. In Coda, he doesn't even get to die.

What makes the performance work¶

Pacino's stated position is that he never played Michael as a gangster — that Michael believes, at every single moment, that he is solving a problem. Nobody in the trilogy ever hears Michael describe himself as a criminal. He describes himself as a man cleaning up other people's messes, protecting his family, doing what has to be done, and going legitimate next year.

The technical achievement is subtraction. Watch the first fifteen minutes of the 1972 film and then the last fifteen of Part II: Pacino has removed, one at a time, the flicker of amusement, the eye contact, the hand gestures, the changes in vocal pitch. By the Havana sequence, he is essentially a face that occasionally speaks. Coppola shoots him increasingly from a low angle and increasingly alone in frame; Willis lets the light off his eyes at the moments it matters. See Cinematography.

The famous doubling: in 1972 Michael is closest to being sympathetic when he's killing people, because he's frightened. By 1974 he is not frightened, and there is nothing left to be sympathetic about.

Two moments to argue about¶

The point of no return. Candidates: volunteering to kill Sollozzo; the restaurant; the door closing at the end of the first film; ordering Fredo's death. The best answer is probably none of them — it's Havana, when he kisses Fredo and says I know it was you, because that's the moment he stops being able to distinguish between family and business, which is the exact distinction the trilogy is built on.

Did he love Kay? The films are genuinely ambiguous and the two lead performances disagree. Pacino plays the Part III reunion in Sicily as a man discovering he has been in mourning for twenty years. Keaton plays it as a woman being handled.

In the novel and elsewhere¶

Puzo's Michael is broadly the same but explained more; the novel's ending, with Kay converted to Catholicism and praying daily for his soul, is arguably bleaker than the film's closing door.

Winegardner's novels fill in his war service and the years the films skip. The Sicilian claims his exile for a story the film gives no hint of.

AFI ranked Michael Corleone the #11 greatest villain in American film — one place below his father's ranking as a hero, in the same poll, in a franchise where the son mostly does what the father taught him.