Good point, but that seems to contradict his cold demeanor towards Tom in the first movie and even some moments in the second movie. Was Micheal just telling Tom that to help him accept his demotion? There were no shows of affection for Tom prior to that.
If Michael was simply "protecting" Tom by treating him as a "sheltered outsider", for lack of a better description, why the need to withhold that info from Tom for so long?
I think the key to understanding the relationship between Tom and Michael was hinted early on, after the hospital scene where they're discussing what their next move would be after hearing Sollozzo's offer to have a meeting. Keeping in mind that Sonny and Tom are about the same age, and the closeness of their relationship as brothers and both deeply involved in the family business, they both would have viewed Michael as the "baby brother," the nice college boy who was essentially outside of the family business.
In the early scene, Sonny is all set to hit Sollozzo, with a hundred button men out on the streets looking for this guy. Tom is using every ounce of persuasion to talk Sonny out of it, as he finally relents to Tom's badgering and desire to patch things up. That's when Michael opens up and says "we can't wait." So, Michael recognizes that Tom seems to hold the upper hand a bit, in that he had a way of persuading Sonny that few others had. He also recognized that Tom was giving bad advice to Sonny, and ostensibly believed that Sonny was wrong in taking Tom's advice.
Tom's advice always seemed more towards the non-violent path, wanting to negotiate and make a deal rather than kill someone. This seemed to be a recurring theme in Tom's character, and perhaps Michael felt that it wasn't really suitable for the job in question. As Michael said, "it's no reflection on Tom," that is, it didn't mean that he was incompetent or disloyal, but that he just didn't seem cut out for the position.
Also, in the final flashback scene from GFII, they're at the table, and Tom tells Mike that "your father and I have been discussing your future," which Michael seems to resent that a bit - "you and my father are discussing my future?" Even if Tom was just a step-brother, he may have still seen him as a kind of "big brother" that he didn't really want as consigliere. Another recurring element in GFII was that the people he was dealing with (Roth, Pentangeli, etc.) were all older - more from his father's generation - and saw Michael as some kind of "junior mobster," something Michael had to overcome and prove that he was not to be underestimated or trifled with. Even Fredo thought he was stepped over and resented his younger brother for that.
Also, in GFII, there were a couple of scenes where Michael shows impatience with Tom, as if he's thinking that Tom's job performance was faltering. In fact, it's interesting to see how much Tom changes from the beginning of GFI, where he's a hot-shot young lawyer with reliable, useful intel, such as finding out that Sollozzo was backed by the Tattaglias and that McCluskey was on his payroll. But later on in GFII, when Roth is on the run, Michael has to inform Tom of Roth's whereabouts from a newspaper article that totally took Tom by surprise. Tom was no longer on top of his game, spending too much time with his mistress and not minding the store and keeping an eye on things as he used to.
reply
share