Mob hit

The first family of HBO's The Sopranos: James Gandolfini, right, as Tony Soprano and Edie Falco as his wife, Carmela. (The Movie Network)

It would have been unthinkable for The Sopranos, which ends its historic run June 10, to go off the air without one more genuflection to the mob-movie masters. That moment came earlier this season, when gangster Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) attends the premiere of Cleaver, an indie film by his nephew and protégé, Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli).

“Who’d a thunk, Christofuh and Marty?” Tony beams, comparing his nephew’s work to that of Goodfellas director Martin Scorsese. The line undoubtedly resonates with Sopranos creator David Chase, born David De Cesare. A frustrated Italian-American filmmaker who felt imprisoned in what he called “the gulag of American network television,” Chase sprinkled his HBO-TV series with wistful tributes to the blessed trinity of Italian directors: Federico Fellini, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.

Chase ends his show knowing that, like his cinematic heroes, he is a made filmmaker at last. The story of a deeply conflicted patriarch who kills clan members to keep the family safe, The Sopranos is a worthy heir to Coppola’s Godfather saga. It’s a distinction Chase clearly coveted. In the first Godfather film, Don Corleone (Marlon Brando) is shot while buying oranges; in the first season of The Sopranos, mob rivals make an attempt on Tony’s life while he is out buying orange juice.

Still, the show’s greatest achievement was not reinventing the American crime drama, but rather changing — indeed, improving — television itself. A producer on The Rockford Files in the late ’70s, then later Northern Exposure (1990-95), Chase was aware of how good and tidily professional TV could be. At the same time, the Stanford film school graduate was keenly aware of how the medium’s decorum could mitigate against art. Chase lived in fear of notes from network executives that said “Spell it out” and “Story needs emotional pay-off.” Great storytelling, Chase believed, was a free expression of the unconscious — his favourite film remains Fellini’s 1963 film 8 1/2, a dreamscape that made extravagant use of symbolism.

When HBO indulged the multiple Emmy award winner in 1999, offering him the chance to make whatever crime drama he wanted, the veteran TV director let his pent-up imagination run wild. He explored his tortured relationship with his own mother by bringing in a female shrink, Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco), to sit with Tony Soprano. The series also had dream sequences and symbolism galore, like the time Tony had a mental breakdown when a family of quacking ducks — representatives of his own noisy offspring, Dr. Melfi assured him — abandoned his backyard swimming pool.

Inspired perhaps by his hoodlum characters, Chase went on to break the laws of television. For one, The Sopranos dispensed with the reaction shot, a basic building block of TV drama. Shockingly, the series also abandoned the conventional mores that made television dramas a reliable, late-evening sedative. In “College,” a breakthrough early episode of the first season, Tony happens upon a missing snitch while escorting daughter Meadow on a university tour. When the opportunity presents itself, the mob boss strangles the traitor with evident relish. As reported in Vanity Fair, HBO originally vetoed the script, suggesting cold-blooded murder would destroy Tony’s “relatability.” (In Coppola’s and Scorsese’s gangster universe, it is lunatic henchmen, not the main characters, who do the whacking.)

“The audience’ll hate the guy,” the network advised Chase. “You can’t do it.” Chase persisted. The episode was based on a university tour he’d taken with his own daughter, and it eventually won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series. Although Chase farmed out most writing and directing assignments over the course of the series’ eight-year run, he has always been the family boss on The Sopranos. (Once, an actor challenged his interpretation of a scene, complaining that the writers were messing with his character. “Who says it’s your character?” Chase snapped.)

The Sopranos's memorable mobster cast includes, from left, Gandolfini as Tony Soprano, Tony Sirico as Paulie Walnuts, Steven Van Zandt as Silvio Dante and Steven R. Schirripa as Bobby Baccilieri. (The Movie Network)

Sensing TV audiences were ready for more potent storytelling, Chase began breaking open his characters with lobster crackers. Certain scenes remain with us: rival gangster Johnny Sack (Vince Curatola) pulverizing one of Tony’s guys, then laughing, “Lemme buy you a drink!” and urinating on him; or, in a more recent episode, Tony smothering the life out of drugged-out, undependable Christopher after a car crash.

Chase’s relentless gaze took in more than murder. No television series was ever more attentive to the hidden dramas of family life, or explored these mysteries with more elevated discourse. In season three, Tony is flooded by bittersweet memories of his youth — particularly the endless fights between his mother and father — after biting into a sweet ham sandwich. He mentions as much to Dr. Melfi.

Tony: “All this from a slice of gabagool?”

Dr. Melfi: “Kind of like Proust’s madeleines.”

Tony: “What? Who?”

Dr. Melfi: “Marcel Proust. Wrote a seven-volume classic, Remembrance of Things Past. He took a bite of madeleine — a kind of tea cookie he used to have when he was a child — and that one bite unleashed a tide of memories of his childhood and, ultimately, his entire life.”

In a landmark critical piece called “Our Mobsters, Ourselves” published in The Nation magazine, critic Ellen Willis noted that The Sopranos bent serial television in the direction of the novel. The Sopranos, she argued, was nothing less than a moral treatise on contemporary society. Author Norman Mailer suggested that The Sopranos came closer to being The Great American Novel than most celebrated works of fiction.

Certainly, it reached more homes. By the end of 2004, the series had sold almost $200 million US worth of DVD box sets. Blood that was spilled on The Sopranos enriched the soil of television. Soon, a myriad of adventurous filmmakers took to the medium, offering up probing, fearless dramas like Six Feet Under, Deadwood, The Wire and Intelligence. As Intelligence creator Chris Haddock told CBC Arts Online earlier this year, “The Sopranos and the HBO dramas that followed were the most exciting thing to happen to filmmaking in the last 20 years.”

The Sopranos is almost over, but the series will endure. Twenty, 30 years from now, we will watch the series and remember what it was like to be alive at the Millennium. The Sopranos were our TV neighbours then, a dysfunctional family who helped explain a morally corrupt time.

What other contemporary work of the imagination captured the moral landscape with such savage, knowing humour? Upon learning that the Sopranos family was having a bad quarter, wife Carmela urges Tony to think about “estate planning.” No, Tony responds, almost wistfully, “We don’t have those Enron-type connections.” Maybe not, but the show made a cameo at the real-life Enron trial, when one of the lawyers said of the company’s executive family, “These guys stole more with a briefcase than the Sopranos could steal with a machine gun.”

The lawyer expected jurors would know The Sopranos. And why not? Who could forget the sweet-smiling monster that was Tony Soprano, a family man who named his daughter Meadow and murdered with his bare hands? Who didn’t know Carmela (Edie Falco), his wife and unindictable co-conspirator? Then there was the ticking time-bomb down at Tony’s office, the Bada Bing strip club: Paulie Walnuts (Tony Sirico), a natural-born killer with a two-tone dye job covering a head filled with rage.

We’ll watch The Sopranos’s finale with a nervousness that normally attends big sporting events. Will Tony end the series sleeping with Carmela or the fishes? Earlier this season, Tony handicapped his odds of surviving. “My estimate? Historically? Eighty percent of the time it ends in the can like Johnny Sack, or on the embalming table at Cozarelli’s.”

Stephen Cole writes about TV for CBC.ca.

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