Amidst the rising media din that became a loud crescendo leading up to “The Many Saints of Newark,” the “Sopranos” prequel movie, I’ve read many quibbles from writers and reviewers. They doth protesteth too much.
The original “Sopranos” series was a TV landmark, a stunning six seasons of superior groundbreaking long-form visual storytelling. Most anything that might be compared with it is bound to come up short in some way.
But as someone who’s such an avid, not just fan of the series but true devotee – I’ve watched it all five times and studied it closely – I found “Saints of Newark” immensely satisfying. And only one significant quibble. As the backstory that shows how Tony Soprano became the man he was in all his complexity, hypocrisy and violent criminality yet likability, it succeeds admirably.
My own youth coincides with that of Tony Soprano, and was not that far away in the Northeast from the film’s Newark setting. I can attest that the general look, feel, tone and tenor of the times feels fittingly accurate. Especially in the music that plays throughout; in the series the music cleverly provided commentary and counterpoint, here it summons up the soundtrack of a bygone era.
I may be a middle-class WASP, but Italian-American culture was all around me in my growing years in an urban upstate New York environment not far from where the infamous 1957 Apalachin Mafia meeting took place. The mob was an undercurrent of the local culture of my youth. On moving to New York City in 1975, I lived in a milieu suffused by the Mafia, especially as I worked and played in and around the music business and the city’s nightclubs – two realms known for the significant mob involvement. Again, “Saints,” like “The Sopranos,” rings true.
The film also captures the racial struggles and conflicts of the time, especially the 1967 Newark riots. The repeated use of the music of the brilliant musician/poet Gil Scott Heron is well-utilized to express the era’s rising Black power, as well as justified social and political resentment.
The mix of criminal enterprise and Italian-American style family both genetically and in spirit, plus the crime gang that was at the core of “The Sopranos,” is effectively etched into place in the prequel. A number of key “Sopranos” characters appear as younger men. Corey Stoll’s Junior Soprano is sublimely underplayed to great effect, especially when almost out of the blue a key act of treachery shows the conniving and betrayal he later undertakes in the series. It is also in this group where I found one false note: John Magaro’s Silvio Dante leans too much into Steven Van Zandt’s tics and mannerisms, eccentricities that become enlarged later in life and aren’t as pronounced in younger men. To accentuate this one misstep, all the other characters to recur later in the series are in the film, people who were growing into who they became. The same can be said for the young Janice Soprano and Tony’s future wife Carmella in “Saints.”
In the same prequel fashion, however, Vera Farmiga as Tony Soprano’s hysterically misanthropic mother Livia dovetails masterfully into the brilliant reading of the character in the series by Nancy Marchand. There’s also a nice touch of foreshadowing that happens between young Tony and his mother in the movie that opens the way for Tony to seek out psychiatric help. (“The Sopranos” is a treasure trove of dramatic foreshadowing.)
The big question in “Saints” is how James Gandalfini’s son Michael plays Tony. There’s an added element for me here, as I discovered on reading the New York Times obituary of James Gandalfini that I’d not just met him in his pre-fame years when he managed a Manhattan music video dance club – introduced by a mutual friend, also Italian-American – but hung out with him for an hour or so one night at the club and exchanged friendly hellos and brief chats a few times later when I would stop in back in my club-crawling young adult years. So in Gandalfini’s son I feel like I see glimpses of his father as a younger man that I knew, if even not well, certainly beyond a nodding acquaintance.
And in the old show business quip about “calling Central Casting to get [in this case] a James Gandalfini type,” who better than his son? And his scion as the young Tony bristles with the adolescent mix of discomfort, bravado, boyish delinquency, yet promise the role calls for; the genetic resemblances only nail his performance down cold.
The millions of “Sopranos” fans should find “The Many Saints of Newark” an appetizing and fulfilling multi-course cinematic meal in the Italian-American mob film tradition. We will never know what happened to Tony Soprano after the cut-to-black at the end of the series; but now we do understand so much better how he became the man he was.
TV Series: “American Rust” – This Showtime series has its parallels to HBO’s “Mare of Eastham;” both take place in rust belt Pennsylvania, the latter in the Eastern end of the state, the former in the Western, for starters. Jeff Daniels, who seems to have of late made a career of playing flawed honorable men, is a small town sheriff embroiled by compromise in a murder case. America’s corroded dream and the dysfunction and worse that it does to those left behind suffuses this disturbing yet poignant tale.
Documentary Film: “Becoming David Geffen” – No one is more the modern Medici than wildly successful music, film and theater mogul Geffen. This affectionate but not at all fawning PBS film, now screening on Netflix, traces the journey of a discomfited geek from Brooklyn into a man of great wealth and rather exquisite taste with an honesty that makes his impressive tale also feel sweetly touching.
Rob Patterson is a music and entertainment writer in Austin, Texas. Email orca@prismnet.com.
From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2021
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