By suddenly shifting gears, ‘Sopranos’ shows it can still take viewers for ride
If you’d predicted in March that the long-awaited sixth season of ‘‘The Sopranos’’ would be defined by gay Vito, you might’ve been called oobatz. Crazy. Gayness has been a plot non grata on this show, even if Tony and the boys do greet one another with kisses.
But Vito Spatafore did become the season’s dramatic engine, once he was spotted in Village People leather on the dance floor of a New York gay bar. His doomed affair with ‘‘Johnny Cakes’’ Jim in New Hampshire may have been one of the series’ gentlest portrayals of love. As a result, Vito has helped cause a divide in ‘‘Sopranos’’ viewership, bex tween those who’ve loved this season and those who’ve hated it.
David Chase’s willingness to pursue this mafia taboo — in the same way ‘‘Brokeback Mountain’’ re-imagined cowboys — was just the kind of counterintuitive move that led him to create a mobster-in-therapy series in the first place. But while those who enjoy Chase’s psychodynamics and dream sequences defend the last 11 episodes, those who prefer more conventional mob-on-mob action deride them. Web debate on the subject is seemingly endless, with comments ranging from profusely positive to crassly homophobic.
The gruesome murder of Vito — which saw Phil Leotardo literally come out of a closet— was a tragedy to some, an overdue relief to others.
I’m on the pro-season-six side of the matter. This final season, which pauses until January after Sunday night’s episode, has been among the series’ best, not just for its unexpected coverage of Vito’s journey but for the way it has dramatized deep shifts in major characters such as Tony, Carmela, and AJ. True to what makes the show unique, Chase and his writers have kept their eyes trained on the character drama. While bringing to a boil the mob war that started when Tony B. killed one of Phil’s crew, the season has also subtly shown characters growing ever more conscious of their mortality and morality. It’s not easy for series TV to convincingly portray inner change, but Chase is now working with a set of characters who are different from those he began with in 1999. They are becoming incrementally more self-aware each year.
This season even gave us a different Tony, with passing moments when he seemed weary of the moral evasions of his life as a mob boss. Once he emerged from his coma, he became newly stricken with pangs of conscience. Faced with another unstable goomah like Gloria (Annabella Sciorra) in the person of Julianna Skiff (Julianna Margulies), he escaped in the nick of time, refusing to make the same mistake again. He may have been motivated by guilt about Carmela’s loyalty during his recovery, but he nonetheless resisted his own worst impulses.
This season, Tony also allowed himself to have compassion for Vito, with a push from Melfi. His insistence that male homosexuality is ‘‘disgusting’’ gave way to open ambivalence about whether sexual orientation deserves punishment by death. ‘‘I suppose something inside me says, ‘God bless,’.’’ he told Melfi, saying he doesn’t much care ‘‘what people do behind closed doors.’’ He even admitted that men who have sex with men in prison get a ‘‘pass.’’ (Perhaps Phil’s violent reaction to Vito was self-disgust? He recently got out of prison, at the same time as Tony B.) While Tony’s therapy moves at a turtle’s pace, and he has already reverted to sex with strippers, his hours with Melfi clearly affect him.
Carmela, too, underwent an important near-death experience this season, albeit a figurative one. In France, she realized that ‘‘When you actually die, life goes on without you. Like it does in Paris, when we’re not here.’’ She wandered through the City of Light in a state of enlightenment, seeing her life from a more realistic perspective. Her pangs of conscience — unlike Tony’s — have become fewer and farther between. Clearly, as we enter the final episodes of the series, we’ll see her continuing to move further away from washing AJ’s socks, and she may even take on a piece of mob action like Angie Bompensiero, whom she admires. As the men on the series became more weakened than ever this season, from Tony’s shooting and Paulie’s cancer to Silvio’s asthma, the women have gained in power.
This season, Carmela has come closer than ever to being Tony’s full partner in crime. She’s on the verge of her final step out of denial, as she closes in on the real fate of Adriana. She’s already made it clear she knows she lives on blood money: ‘‘The day I met Tony, I knew who that guy was,’’ she told Melfi.
In his sullen way, AJ also spent the season in flux. He appears to be getting closer to a mob life — not just because he’s famous in the New York club circuit as Tony’s son, but because he has nothing else to do with himself. Now that he’ll be working at a mob construction site, he may well fall into the family business. And my instinct is that he will ultimately end up like another mob boss’s son, Jackie Aprile Jr., who died from sloppiness and entitlement.
Not that such a deep loss would pry Tony and Carmela out of the mob. The most interesting thing about the Vito arc may not have been his gay struggles. Vito, played with admirable range by Joseph Gannascoli, took one of the show’s ongoing themes — you can’t leave the mob — to a more sophisticated level. Regularly on ‘‘The Sopranos,’’ someone tries to leave the life, but isn’t allowed to. In the first episode of this season, Gene Pontecorvo was desperate to retire to Florida, but when Tony refused he hung himself in an excruciatingly unsparing scene.
But Vito did succeed in getting out, and finding a more natural existence in a small town with a man. He had the rare chance. And yet the life called to him; it was in his blood. He brought himself back to it, and back into the closet, and in the process committed a kind of suicide.
Just when we thought that he was out, he pulled himself back in.
Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com.
