Mob hit 'The Sopranos' is a killer series with a smart edge
Twenty-seven years after "The Godfather," TV and the movies are lousy with mob stories, from the schlocky wonders of "The Last Don II" to the "deze-dem-and-doze" shtick of "Analyze This." Recently, as evidence of the overripening of the wiseguy genre, we got an unintentionally parodic TV movie called "Bella Mafia" that hinged on lines like "the papers, I want the papers," and a stale remake of "Gloria" that had a big-haired, New Yawk-ified Sharon Stone yelling, "What's the matta wit' you, kid? You're buggin' me." Even Martin Scorsese's "Casino" succumbed to a plot line that was as wobbly as the drugged-out Stone's high heels. And so if you had wagered that the very finest and most addictive TV drama of this season would be set in the bloody world of capos, car trunks, and cannoli, I might have responded with a resounding "Fuggedaboutit."
But there's no forgetting about "The Sopranos," HBO's 13-part series in which a New Jersey capo faces down depression and family power shifts. The show, whose season finale airs Sunday at 9 p.m., has triumphed brilliantly over the cliches of an American genre that is often considered to be the late-20th-century equivalent of the Western. With sly Freudian wit and cultural realism, it has ushered the image of mobsters into an era when Prozac is the new boss and gangsters are doing turf battle with gangstas. Miraculously, each episode of "The Sopranos" has managed to be even better than the last, breaking that golden rule of series TV that requires even the best dramas, from "The Practice" to "ER," to be painfully uneven.
The central gimmick of "The Sopranos" is that a made man is in psychotherapy -- the same concept behind Robert De Niro's "Analyze This." But series creator David Chase has steered quite clear of broad comedy, opting for a hybrid tone that only flirts with laughter. Chase uses the therapy -- "terapy," as Tony Soprano calls it -- as a way into the human side of a mobster, and not as a way to send up psychobabble and Italian-Americans. "The Sopranos" pivots on the fact that, despite his growing power in the world of crime, Tony Soprano is just another modern suburban man who needs to examine his private life -- especially the cruelties of his mother -- to find inner peace. Like ordinary law-abiding citizens, he is subject to panic attacks, to midlife blues, to a pair of growing children, and to a spouse who, like his mother, is always unsatisfied by him. And because doctor-patient confidentiality does not extend to homicide, Tony can only spend his sessions talking about his murderous impulses, and not murder itself. On the couch, if not on the street, he is like us.
The hours with Dr. Melfi, and the subplots about Tony's home life, make Tony into a more dimensional -- and less mythic -- mob character than even Michael Corleone of the "Godfather" series. While directors like Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola have cultivated the larger-than-life, romanticized vision of organized criminals as a sort of royalty, "The Sopranos" thrives on demystifying the life, on giving the guys a two-bit local quality that makes it easy to imagine running into them at a fast-food joint. These goodfellas have vague attachments to the gentlemanly honor code of the Old World, but they really want to be like the characters in the same mob movies we've all seen. The show has fun making allusions to other mob fare, with a car horn that toots "The Godfather" theme song, a mobster doing imitations of Al Pacino in "The Godfather Part III," and a cameo by Scorsese.
The show's writing is extraordinary, particularly as Tony's relationship with his mother (who tries to have him whacked) lends "The Sopranos" the same undercurrent of Greek tragedy that charged through "The Grifters." The scripts flow smoothly from the R-rated guy banter to the therapy sessions, which never seem contrived, and all the plot strands come together slowly, without any artificial force. It's the sort of writing you'll find only on cable channels like HBO, not simply because the language is authentic but because the themes are as unsettling as they are intelligent. Only two or three moments in the season have fallen flat, and each has involved Dr. Melfi's family, most notably when her ex-husband delivers a speech about the stereotyping of Italian-Americans. Also, a blackly comic subplot about Soprano crew member Christopher, played with wired intensity by Michael Imperioli, was cut short, even though it was rich enough to be a series in itself.
As Tony, James Gandolfini is a revelation. One minute he's New Jersey's own Fred Flintstone, the next he's Al Capone, but either way you never lose sympathy with him. With the tiniest shifts in his chunky face, and eyes that can recede into his lids, Gandolfini moves seamlessly from pent-up violence and sexual desire to wounded boyishness. In therapy, he resists self-examination with a tight face, but at home with his wife, he expands on human behavior with lines like "It's what they call negative attention-getting." As his wife, Carmela, Edie Falco is blond and brassy, with an abrasiveness that is hard to resist as she dresses down a needy priest on Sunday night. The showiest performance is by Nancy Marchand as the whining, two-faced Livia, Tony's mother, who now seems to be feigning senility to escape the consequences of her actions. But the quieter actors in "The Sopranos" are no less impressive, particularly Tony Sirico as Soprano crew member Paulie Walnuts. On Sunday night, when he confesses to having seen a therapist, he brings a wonderful grace to the simple lines "I had some issues. Enough said."
Sunday, as thunder, lightning, and the FBI bring their wrath down on Tony Soprano's New Jersey suburb, the first season of "The Sopranos" ends. But I have little doubt that most fans will re-watch the entire series, which HBO will re-air Wednesdays beginning June 9.
The show has cemented HBO's reputation as the home of groundbreaking series like "The Larry Sanders Show," and distinguished a TV season whose only watched new drama is "Providence," a contrived soap opera that, surprisingly, has nothing to do with the mob. 