"Legitimate" Business
Common to all three films in the Godfather series is the idea that there's a fine line separating organized crime and American corporate capitalism. While the first film in the series focuses on the hierarchical aspect of the family business, showing how the Corleone family is structured a lot like a corporation, The Godfather: Part II develops this theme further, showing us how the Corleone family operates within a political framework. Hence, one of the key characters in the film is Senator Pat Geary, who is introduced early in the film as someone willing to do business with Michael Corleone on the condition that he can extort the Corleone family just as he imagines the mob frequently extorts its own business partners. Later in the film, we're shown a large meeting in Cuba between American business interests and the then-dictator Fulgencio Batista. Heads of influential manufacturing and resource corporations are all sitting along a massive conference table along with, of course, Michael Corleone and Hyman Roth.
The Family
While Michael makes a series of missteps running the family business, he struggles just as much if not more running his family itself. Indeed, much of the drama of the film stems from his failure to fill his father's shoes as a proper patriarch. His lack of control over the family leads to Fredo helping Roth attempt a hit on Michael, which in turn scares away Kay and the children. Tom Hagen is the other character toeing the line between family business and regular family, and towards the end of the film, Michael accuses him of attempting to defect to go work as vice president of a casino. Tom is clearly hurt by the accusation from someone he considers a brother. Contrast this with the depiction of the young Vito Corleone, driven by revenge for his father, brother, and mother, and working hard in America to create a good life for his family in a new country that's particularly hard on Italian immigrants. His success is always tied tightly into his love of his family, and the big contrast between Michael and Vito is, simply, that Vito knows how to do right by his people.
Catholic, But Not Religious
Francis Ford Coppola takes frequent opportunity to conflate the pomp and circumstance of the Catholic faith with the pomp and circumstance of mob activity. A first communion party stands as an opportunity to for Michael to hold court and try to woo a senator. The San Rocco festa provides cover for Vito's murder of Don Fanucci. On that note, a Catholic funeral becomes the sight of Vito's brother's murder. To some extent, Coppola obviously indulges in the baroque aspects of Catholic ceremony and their opulent aesthetics, but he takes a wry approach to reverence. We watch Don Fanucci pompously praise the effigy carted through the street, and witness no mention whatsoever of the actual religious aspect of Anthony's first communion. The relationship between the film and Catholicism is complex—perhaps an indication of Coppola's own relationship with his religion.
The Collapsing Patriarchy
While there is little indication in any interviews or literature that Francis Ford Coppola was particularly interested in second-wave feminism, The Godfather Part II works, in its own way, to imagine a fantasy of what the collapse of the patriarchy might look like. The scenes where Michael tries to exercise patriarchal power in his family are on the whole pretty repulsive—whether he's trying to manipulate his sister into dumping her fiancé, assaulting Kay for refusing him the son he was so obsessed with her bearing, or watching from a bay window as his brother Fredo is murdered. His leadership of the family is constantly contrasted with one of a loving, doting Vito building the Corleone empire on his commitment to his family. Patriarchal collapse plays out in other ways too, as we watch the fall of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba and see Tom Hagen and Frank Pantangeli reminisce about the fallen Roman Empire. All of the people in power in the film are male, but over the course of the narrative, their dominance comes to seem very flimsy.
The West
In the American imagination, the West has generally been construed as something of a blank slate where men could carve out empires on desolate planes or unforgiving desert. Michael's move to a compound in Nevada represents his own attempt at something like manifest destiny, but his move west goes about as well as that of the Donner Party. His attempts to establish a stronghold on casinos in Las Vegas are frustrated by a botched deal with Hyman Roth, and his elaborate compound on Lake Tahoe becomes progressively emptier over the course of the film, leaving him without much of the family or many of the friends he enjoys in the beginning. Michael's failure in the West is conflated with his failure as the head of a corporate Corleone family, and we learn that there's some version of an American dream that Michael will simply never achieve.
Father and Son
The relationship between father and son is one of the most important dynamics in this film. We're constantly given juxtapositions, after all, of Vito's rise as a mobster and Michael's fall. But, perhaps even more significantly, we're shown the interactions between fathers and sons. We witness the young Vito bounce infant Michael and tell him that he loves him, but never once see Michael express the same pride and care for his son. The most tender moment between Michael and his son comes early in the movie, when Michael says he likes the drawing his son left for him. But then the attempted hit occurs, and the whole family dynamic shifts. And as far as the adult Michael is concerned, the only memories he really seems to have of his father are those of a mafia don. He recounts cold-blooded advice his father gave him and worries to his mother about his own ability to keep the family together like Vito did. In a very Freudian sense, we get the impression that daddy issues drive much of Michael's misfortune.
"That Sicilian thing"
Kay alludes to "that Sicilian thing that's 2000 years old" when she tells Michael why she refused to bring another son into a mafia family. Indeed, the specter of Sicily looms over the characters in the film like some sort of ancient debt driving their fates. Vito, of course, makes it a point to return home to murder the man who killed his father, brother, and mother—and the toddler Michael was taken along on this trip. Frank Pantangeli gets cold feet testifying against Michael when his brother from Sicily shows up in the courtroom and, ominously, Michael later remarks that whatever prevented Frank from testifying was "between the brothers." There's a sense that Sicily is more than just heritage, more than where the Corleones and their people came from. It directs their lives in America, and shapes their lives as adults.
