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The dark origins of the Sopranos The show revolutionised television — but now it has been squeezed into a film

Alessandro Nivola and Michael Gandolfini as Dickie and Tony in The Many Saints of Newark. Credit: The IMDB

Alessandro Nivola and Michael Gandolfini as Dickie and Tony in The Many Saints of Newark. Credit: The IMDB


September 24, 2021   5 mins

When David Chase revolutionised television in the late 1990s, he was sick of television. A frustrated fifty-something veteran of an industry where writers were rarely mistaken for auteurs, he wanted most of all to make the kind of character-driven, grown-up, mid-budget movies that Hollywood still believed in. Even after he’d shot the pilot for a drama about a tormented New Jersey mobster in therapy, Chase hoped that HBO would turn it down so that he could expand it into a feature film. Instead they said yes, and the golden age of what we now call “prestige TV” began, on 10 January 1999, with the first episode of The Sopranos.

It would be an exaggeration to say that The Sopranos whacked the kind of movies Chase loved, but it certainly helped to put television and cinema on a more equal footing. As Hollywood gave up on the once-fertile territory between blockbusters and low-budget indies, viewers found that their appetite for sophisticated storytelling could be met by the likes of HBO, AMC and, later, Netflix. Today, The Sopranos’ successors dominate the cultural conversation and provide safe harbour for fugitive movie stars and directors who are tired of scratching around for movie financing.

The days when the inner conflict of a dangerous man was sure-fire Emmy material may be over, but The Sopranos remains the Beatles of prestige TV: it was the first and, in many people’s eyes, it is still the best. In 2019, the Guardian crowned it the greatest show of the 21st century so far, ahead of The Wire and Mad Men. A soup-to-nuts Sopranos rewatch became a popular lockdown activity among a certain constituency, who revelled in the skewed black comedy, eccentric detours and endless subtleties. Talking Sopranos, a nicely timed hit podcast by former cast members Michael Imperioli and Steve Schirripa, has led to a book deal for an oral history. If there hasn’t been a backlash yet, there never will be.

Yet even in 2010, three years after The Sopranos’ fearless cut-to-black finale, Chase was still conflicted about his role as the godfather of prestige TV. “Look, I do not care about television,” he told Brett Martin, author of Difficult Men. “I don’t care about where television is going or anything else about it. I’m a man who wanted to make movies. Period.”

Eventually he did make one, but his rock’n’roll coming-of-age-story Not Fade Away suffered the fate of many serious mid-budget movies. Released in 2012, it earned just $600,000 from a $20m budget. I’m sure that Chase sincerely wanted to make a Sopranos prequel (now 76, he doesn’t do things he doesn’t want to do) but I suspect that his latest project was also his last shot at the big screen. Thus The Many Saints of Newark, released this week, finds him leveraging his phenomenal success in a medium he doesn’t respect to get him back into one that he reveres. As Alessandro Nivola, who stars as dapper capo Dickie Moltisanti, recently told Rolling Stone: “For a movie like this to be made at all was an anomaly, and it was only being made because [of] the IP of the show, the brand of the show.”

Chase and co-writer Lawrence Konner offer fan service to a fault. As the movie begins in 1967, most of the cast have the tricky task of embodying unfinished iterations of some of the most memorable characters in modern television, with mixed results. Corey Stoll is deftly hilarious as Tony Soprano’s uncle Junior, a tetchy, charmless sub’s-bench gangster desperate for a level of respect that he is incapable of earning, but John Magaro gives a sketch-show impersonation of Steve Van Zandt’s Silvio Dante, with his tonsorial slapstick and perpetual fuhgeddaboudit grimace. Michael Gandolfini excels at the emotionally gruelling job of playing the younger version of his late father James. He has the same melancholy weight, that physical unhappiness, and the sense of someone caught reluctantly, but not reluctantly enough, in the tractor beam of familial violence.

This embryonic rogues’ gallery revolves around the most important new character introduced by the prequel, Nivola’s Dickie, the doomed father of serial fuck-up Christopher Moltisanti. He foreshadows Tony’s agonies of leadership far more than Tony’s own father, played by Jon Bernthal as a dim, swaggering thug. By comparison, Dickie is a Shakespearean figure whose attempts at operating by a moral code (well, by Mafia standards) are ruptured by uncontrollable outbursts of violence and poisoned by guilt.

Casting Goodfellas’ Ray Liotta as Dickie’s monstrous father, whose laboured grunts through the bedroom wall are somehow the most disturbing sound in a film that also features a hideous bit of freelance dentistry, is much more than a mob-movie in-joke — but it adds a layer of irony, given that the Mafia depicted here is pre-postmodern. The mobsters in the TV show were shaped by seeing themselves on screen, as if performing a wise-guy routine for an invisible audience. Would they have behaved in quite the same way before The Godfather? Tony has a famous line in the pilot episode — “Lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over” — which suggests that he grew up in the glory days; now those glory days are on the big screen, but the only thing more glamorous about them is the wardrobe. There’s already the stink of decay.

What’s genuinely new for a franchise that previously confined people of colour to supporting roles is the introduction of Newark’s black population, specifically Dickie’s runner-turned-rival Harold McBrayer (Leslie Odom Jr.). The movie uses the famous riots of 1967 both to cover up a crime and to spur Harold into demanding more than scraps from the table. Once it snaps into the 1970s, we see how the growth of radical black consciousness filtered into organised crime and glimpse the white flight that turned the Sopranos into suburbanites, although there’s a sub-plot for Harold which unpleasantly plays into the Mafia’s racist paranoia.

This conflict between the declining Italians and insurgent black gangsters invites unflattering comparisons to Fargo’s similarly themed fourth season, which has enough time to give both sides of that war equal attention, and much more besides. Harold’s transformation relies on clumsy shorthand (ballooning afros, a Last Poets concert) in lieu of scenes that might have given him real depth and agency. He is less a person than a symbol of the social change that the Moltisanti/Soprano empire can’t even understand, let alone halt, and his arc is wrapped up in a mid-credits sting which feels like a mildly insulting afterthought. Vera Farmiga as Livia, Tony’s mother and master of mindfuckery, also smoulders with untapped potential.

I have no bias towards television. Some potentially great movies have been fattened into slow-moving miniseries solely because that’s where the money is. But it’s hard to watch The Many Saints of Newark, entertaining though it is, without wondering why it needed to be a movie. Solidly directed by Alan Taylor, whose spotty CV ranges from some of the best Sopranos episodes to the absolute worst Marvel movie (Thor: The Dark World), it’s neither as strange and grubby as the TV show nor particularly cinematic. With its ensemble cast and myriad sub-plots, this is a narrative that could have done a lot more with six hours (at least) than with two, and ends with Dickie’s story concluded but the adolescent Tony’s just beginning. Had it come out as a stand-alone movie in 1997, we wouldn’t be wondering about these alternatives, but our viewing metabolism has changed, and it was The Sopranos that changed it. Like Tony, Dickie and Harold, we want more.

“Someone once said that movies are a cathedral, and I do still feel that,” Chase told Brett Martin. “A cathedral is big. It’s epic. It’s intense.” It’s almost tragic that Chase made a watershed TV show that was as big, epic and intense as any movie and then refused to accept it. Now he’s made a movie that feels smaller in every way. I want to tell him that he built his cathedral years ago.


Dorian Lynskey is an author, journalist and UnHerd columnist.

Dorianlynskey

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Andrew Raiment
Andrew Raiment
3 years ago

Interesting to read of David Chase being so enamoured with the movies having spent virtually the whole of his career in television. He started in the industry at the time, when it was enjoying a creative renaissance.

Cinema today is like modern popular music, vapid and ephemeral. Television (depending upon the broadcaster) appears to give writers the freedom and creativity to develop interwoven stories and characters that you used to see in films 40-50 years ago. Hopefully that will remain so, unless the large media companies decide to bludgeon us with po faced “Social Justice” messages and there are increasing signs of that.

Last edited 3 years ago by Andrew Raiment
William Murphy
William Murphy
3 years ago

The famous riots of 1967? Having lived in Detroit from 1998 to 2000, Motown’s riots were the only 1967 conflict I had been aware of. Huge areas of Detroit were still a post-apocalypse wasteland in 2000. (I lived out in safe and prosperous Farmington Hills) And Detroit’s woes have been very well reported, not least in the fine book ‘The last days of Detroit”. This takes the grim story up to 2010, when what’s left of inner Detroit sounds even worse than my memories.

But in 1967 there were less famous riots in 170 communities across America. Reportedly parts of Newark have similarly never been fully restored. So there was some educational value in seeing the racial violence portrayed in this movie. And the National Guard moving into the centre of a US city with an armoured vehicle. And in seeing some of the racist attitudes frankly aired. Though the philosophical advice from the lifer prisoner smells a bit of 21st century psychologizing. Inevitably the nostalgic top hits soundtrack playing through much of the film suggests a slightly lazy approach to evoking the old days. But it is one hoary cliché which I love.

Last edited 3 years ago by William Murphy
Richard Kuslan
Richard Kuslan
3 years ago

The damning premise of The Sopranos, having watched every episode (for the acting, primarily of the women: Edie Falco, Jamie Lynn-Siegler, Drea de Matteo and especially Lola Glaudini, all of whom I believed totally, which I can’t say for the men) was the equation of mafiosi with the middle-class viewers they were selling the program to. This is a species of contempt, but it is subdued in this television series; it is rife in productions out of Hollywood and New York and London. (I’ve written about this phenomenon in an essay focused upon the best exemplar of this, the American version of The Office.) This premise alone destroys, for me at least, believability. It is essential that truth be the basis of all that the falsehood of fiction is supposed to convey. When falsehood is employed to convey falsehoods, the job of the actor is that much more difficult; hence, my appreciation of the actors who flourished in spite of it. One wonders how the movie will present this theme of moral equivalency between the manifestly guilty and the innocent.

Last edited 3 years ago by Richard Kuslan
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
3 years ago
Reply to  Richard Kuslan

I had not thought of it this way but that is exactly why it rang hollow to me

Richard Kuslan
Richard Kuslan
3 years ago

You might be interested in my essay on the American version of The Office, which is the premiere example of contempt, passed off as comedy.
https://voegelinview.com/the-nihilist-masquerade-or-contempt-edy-not-comedy/

Last edited 3 years ago by Richard Kuslan
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
3 years ago

The Sopranos my have been different but it wasn’t very good.
And the adulation it received from the industry and media puts me in mind of those tower blocks so loved by architects but hated by the people who have to live in them

Last edited 3 years ago by Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
3 years ago

I watched the Shield with my son after watching the Wire.
His verdict was that the Shield was better. I think it the best thing ever made for TV.
We are on series 5.It has not aged and each series seems to be better than the previous one. As I remember the final episode of series 7 was shocking even for the Shield but because of the character driven tension and not violence.

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
3 years ago

From the very first episode I’d say. With VM’s contempt for his fellow officers and his belief that only he has clarity and sense of purpose to to cut through the BS and find the solution which puts him above the law.
What is also compelling is how VM finds the weakness in everybody who looks tries to bring him down and turns the tables on them

Last edited 3 years ago by Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Christopher Barclay
Christopher Barclay
3 years ago

No one HAD to watch the Sopranos. They chose to do so. In their millions.

Ethniciodo Rodenydo
Ethniciodo Rodenydo
3 years ago

So does Love Island. In fact I bet Love Island gets more viewers. Does that make it great television? Are you a fan?