Have Your Gabagool & Eat It Too
The Many Saints of Newark is not quite planet, not quite moon
A prequel is a dangerous proposition for any story whose main character once spat contemptuously that, in his opinion, “Remember when is the lowest form of conversation.” It’s an even stranger offering coming from Sopranos-creator David Chase, a man who, according to (fairly-well-substantiated) legend refused to tie up the loose end which had proven most consistently tantalizing for fans of his show — “What Happened to the Russian Paulie Shot In the Woods in Pine Barrens?” — precisely because he felt it would bring viewers too much pleasure to do so. In an interview with Rolling Stone to promote The Many Saints of Newark, the long-awaited theatrical-release prequel to the greatest television series ever made, Chase is at pains to put daylight between his vision of the story being told and the way the movie is being marketed; i.e., as a Tony Soprano ‘origin story.’
Even the tawdry phrase, ‘origin story,’ implies the purely commercial world of platform-bestriding intellectual properties (heavy emphasis on the second word in that one-two combo), the numbing codex of comic book superheroes with who-gives-a-shit powers and how-could-I-give-a-fuck pseudo-mythic geneses who appear in all of each others’ movies to cross promote their own across the same Universe™, leaving fun “easter eggs” for perspicacious content consumers wherever they go. Hey, it’s not product placement if it’s the whole point of the movie! At the end of his Rolling Stone interview, Chase makes a point of his lack of sympathy for film executives, whose industry “happens to contain an art form,”and suggests that if they didn’t want to deal with aesthetic considerations, they should have gone into the shoe business (which feels like a bit of a dig at, say, Jimmy Choo).
David Chase doesn’t plant easter eggs, he makes allusions — and he makes plenty. In a sixth season episode of The Sopranos, when an elderly Ukrainian man is accidentally shot dead rather than New York mob boss Phil Leotardo, whom he resembles, the New Jersey crew realizes the hit went awry when they see the Ukrainian’s photo in the paper the next day and note the uncanny similarities. The scene is a reference to the midnight snack scene in Goodfellas, when Tommy, Jimmy, and Henry note how much the man in Tommy’s mother’s painting looks like Billy Batts, whom they are about to bury, but who is still alive in the trunk of Henry’s car. Actor Frank Vincent played both Billy Batts and Phil Leotardo. But once the Sopranos had been running for long enough, Chase was also willing to plant subtle allusions to his own work: in the same episode, the two Neapolitan hit men who accidentally killed the Ukrainian are flying back to Italy and briefly, in the background, if we’re watching the faces of the other passengers on their flight, we see that one of them is David Chase himself. The other time Chase appears on-screen in the run of the series is in season two, as a man drinking coffee in Naples, who responds to Paulie Walnuts’s espresso toast — “Commendatori!” — with a look of blank contempt. So, a subtle reward for an attentive viewer: the nameless, speechless Italian man from near the beginning of the series took a trip to the States four seasons later. The world is bigger than that which surrounds our main characters.
So here’s a semi-philosophical question, one that lands somewhere between a Buddhist koan and asking how one can know whether something is pornography: when does a knowing allusion or metatextual reference become a cross-platform intra-IP easter egg? Chase makes one more Hitchcockian appearance on-screen in The Many Saints of Newark, and it’s subtle enough to make the one about the Neapolitan traveler look as though writ in flashing neon: during a funeral scene, David Chase appears for what can’t be more than a second and a half on camera, being helped into a back room. As he enters, someone says “Ercole...” In one of the 86 episodes of The Sopranos, Tony discovers that his father Johnny and Uncle Junior had another brother, the developmentally disabled Uncle Ercole (Hercules), who was institutionalized, and only ever referred to cryptically by Tony’s mother Livia as Johnny’s “half-wit brother,” which the young Tony had always assumed was merely a shot at Junior. Blink watching the movie, or sneeze watching the TV show, and you’ll miss it.
But other moments of the film that speak directly to the series feel far more obtrusive, and a whole lot eggier. When Uncle Junior says that young Tony “doesn’t have the makings of a varsity athlete,” the moment hits the theatre with something like the energy I imagine crackles through a stadium when the Stones play the opening strains of “Satisfaction.” Chase is at pains to make clear that a period-piece romp full of ironic foreshadowing, Back to the Future Italian-Style, is not the kind of movie he wanted to make. But ultimately one has to decide if a thing is a planet or a moon — either it’s its own body, following its own orbit, or else one accepts that it is a satellite meant to be understood primarily in terms of its relationship to the larger world. Until its very final minutes, The Many Saints of Newark refuses to make that decision, and, when it finally does, opts for the choice it’s been straining against the whole time.
This is partly due to the structural weaknesses of the plot-driving story, an antagonism between Soprano crew member Dickie Molitsanti and his African-American underling-turned-competitor, Harold McBrayer. Emboldened by the historical Black uprising in Newark in 1967, Harold decides that the numbers racket, which runs on Black money, should be controlled by him, an African-American, rather than the Italian-American mob.
But there’s a flatness, both to Harold’s character and to the relationship between him and Moltisanti, such that when the film abandons the storyline between them unresolved, we don’t even really care. This comes partly down to the fact that Harold feels less like a fully imagined character than he does a conceptual embodiment of the theme of Black Empowerment. There’s hardly any of the complexity and contradiction of, for example, the character of Maurice Tiffen, from the season four Sopranos episode “Watching Too Much Television” — one of the installments in the series which dealt most explicitly with White Flight, segregated housing, and other Newark urban history issues through a Black-Italian racial lens. Tiffen, played with powerful understatement by Vondie Curtis-Hall, was a corrupted former 1960s revolutionary with a detached, almost stoic approach to his fallen nature. “What are we supposed to be, the only honest men?” he asks Councilman Zellman, his fellow ex-leftist gone to seed, who finds himself indulging in crocodile tears over their complicity in Tony Soprano’s rackets. The way Tiffen asks the question, it is freighted with layers of bitter, mournful sadness — as well as self-exculpation, selfishness, and moral inertia. In other words: ambiguous, multifaceted, human, being. Harold McBrayer, with a billing far further up the cast of characters than Maurice Tiffen, is given no moment matching this richness. The script doesn’t know what to do with him or with the third act of his story line, ending the film in a declension which contracts out all meaning to the television series — that is to say, the story ends in such a way that it would be essentially meaningless in reference to the narrative of the film we’ve just seen if we didn’t know what it eventually lead up to on the show.
Does that mean that Chase has finally started making cross-platform easter egg salad? That he’s finally in the business of making the fans happy with references to things they already know and love? Not if the internet is to be believed. The comments under the posts at the very hilarious Sopranos-meme Instagram account Time Immemorial are striking notes of both tragedy and farce to sound out their disappointment in the film. The guy who runs the account itself, who also co-created the real-life SopranosCon, posted an evenhanded, paragraph-long review of the film, in which, after pledging his undying loyalty to Chase (which I second), he lamented the inconsistencies between the series and the film, of which he said there were “too many to list here [on Instagram].” I wasn’t as disturbed by the quantity of the inconsistencies so much as the quality of them; strange choices with key characters from the series, like Silvio Dante, who on the show has a daughter on the same soccer team as Tony’s, was in “a little crew” with Tony when they were young, but is in Many Saints a grown, in fact bald, man while Tony is still a child, and appears to be a made guy (referring to “this thing of ours” in conversation with Dickie Moltisanti) while Tony is still in high school. Why?
In that conversation with Dickie, Silvio is referring to Tony Soprano’s immense potential, perhaps even “beyond this thing of ours”; a teacher at Tony’s school also extols his intelligence and his leadership skills — but we’re not shown evidence of any of these traits. Tony Soprano is the structuring absence of the whole story of Many Saints — we are getting a peek into this social world before he made himself the centre of it — only he’s not absent; he’s on the periphery. But he’s not on the periphery doing anything particularly interesting. In the closing seconds of the film, he has internally resolved to become the Tony Soprano we know from the series — but we already knew he would become the Tony we know from the series, by definition. It is literally impossible not to root for Michael Gandolfini, son of the late and legendary James, as he plays the not-yet-fully-baked version of the character his father brought to life — and plays him with sensitivity, restraint, care, and grace. But as David Chase was at pains to emphasize, this is not a Tony Soprano origin story. Maybe it should have been.
For all that, The Many Saints of Newark isn’t a failed film, or even a bad one. Its greatest successes are atmospheric, conjuring a mob story from the time of the peak of the American mafia’s power and influence — “When mobsters dressed well,” per Chase in Rolling Stone — with bleak terror. The most ironic thing about some of the negative reviews that Many Saints has received is that a number of them accuse the movie of indulging in the one thing in which it absolutely does not: nostalgia. The picture has garnered Chase unfavourable comparisons to Scorcese and Coppola, but he has made a film which escapes the greatest moral liability, not to say failure, of theirs — the cinematic romance of the sociopathic, anti-democratic, violent, racist, misogynist, illicit capitalism of the mob. Sure, Henry Hill’s whole existence was marbled with paranoiac brutality, but the alternative was to live in a place that put ketchup on egg noodles. There are no sumptuous tracking shots into the Copa or razor-cut garlic cloves in Chase’s Newark of the 1960s and 70s. It’s full of men who’ll move their families across town when a Black neighbour appears or kick their wives down the stairs for leaving feminine hygiene products out where they can be seen. Even in the sterile dead-end of 2021, even in the world of a character whose introduction in the late 1990s consisted of his fears that he “came in at the end, the best is over,” remember when is still the lowest form of conversation.