Back Story
Where Tony Soprano really comes from
A new prequel respects the famous ending of “The Sopranos”. But it messes with the beginning
Every story is a little life, and every ending a miniature death. Like the moments before an actual death, the finale of a beloved drama feels sacred, a bedside vigil for the show and all its characters. There must be an end, but, as the critic Frank Kermode observed, a good one helps give shape not only to the plot, but to the chaos of reality. Botch the ending, on the other hand, and it can cast a retroactive shadow over everything that went before.
The more you care about a story, the higher the stakes. So, after six seasons in which viewers watched Tony Soprano face, and fail, all manner of moral tests (but loved him anyway), murder his mobster enemies (and some of his friends), bring up his children and, along the way, reinvent television drama, the ending of “The Sopranos” was bound to be traumatic. When it came, in 2007, it was as bold as it was controversial. Tony meets his family at a diner. Outside his daughter Meadow is having trouble parking, a detail that, as the clock ticks down, becomes excruciating. Hunted and haunted, fearing assassins, Tony glances at the door. The screen cuts to black—affording him the precarious dignity of an actual human being, who knows what is coming, what must come, but not when.
Tony is still there, keeping an eye on the door. (In the end, isn’t everyone?) To revisit him after that stunning anti-ending would have been sacrilege; in any case, James Gandolfini, the actor who played him, died in 2013. But though a sequel is impossible, a film prequel—in which a mischievous, teenage Tony is played eerily by Michael Gandolfini, James’s son—is out in cinemas now, co-written and co-produced by David Chase, the mastermind of those six seasons.
Set against the Vietnam war and the riots of 1967, “The Many Saints of Newark” has teenage Tony gamely starting a numbers racket at school. But he is too young to commit truly dark deeds, which are left to his mafia mentor, Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola). As with the adult Tony on TV, Dickie is our guy. “He won’t do that, will he?” the audience thinks again, as the prospect of some heinous act looms. Oh. He will. The crooks’ vices, the film shows, are a refraction of the abuses and corruption all around them. Brutality dominoes down the generations. Tony is pulled in before he could ever get out.
“Many Saints” is a faithful stroll down memory lane—revisiting the characters and sets of the series, as well as the hairstyles, sharp suits and tail-finned cars of the 1960s. It respects the sanctity of that ending in the diner. But it also does something else: it interferes with the show’s beginning.
Beginnings can seem less hallowed than endings, less definitive and more fungible. After all, by the time you stop to think about them, they generally happened a long time ago. But they are just as hard to pull off well, and matter just as much. Edward Said, another critic, linked fictional beginnings to a primordial need to identify origins more broadly, and so make sense of life and the world. Beginnings, he wrote, are always poignant, because they foreclose possibilities as well as opening them up. For a story, as for a person, a beginning is a fateful moment. Mess with it at your peril.
In his first scene in the new film, Tony play-fights with Dickie—a joshing portent of the grown-up strife to follow. It is a clever introduction, but less memorable or profound than Tony’s original beginning. Watch the pilot episode from 1999 again: he is first glimpsed in the opening credits as he drives on the New Jersey Turnpike, caught in profile as he lights a cigar, then in his rear-view mirror, revealed yet unknowable. The action proper begins in his psychiatrist’s office, where Tony brusquely denies that anything is wrong with him. “Lately,” he says, in a line that, for a pilot, is audaciously downbeat, “I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.” Next comes a flashback to a visit made by a family of ducks to his pool.
Before long Tony’s uncle is trying to kill him, his mother is trying to kill him, his crime family is deep in ultraviolence and his actual family proves dysfunctional. Yet those first few daring, disconcerting minutes somehow set up all the dodges and wounds that follow. This is where Tony Soprano comes from. It was a perfect beginning. ■