His guys aren’t wrong to be suspicious of the Wonder Bread types. Tony’s misadventures at the private country club make him feel like a cartoon character, a deadly mook that well-heeled types can get a buzz from being around: the human equivalent of one of those illegal Monte Cristo cigars Tony gives Cooz. Tony genuinely tries to pump the swells for tips on how to invest his windfall, but they always steer the conversation back to the Mafia. You can see a little bit of the life go out of Tony’s eyes each time this happens. That Cusamano, possibly the only other Italian American in the group, clearly has more in common with the non-Italians than with Tony makes things even more humiliating.
After a while, Tony decides to lean into the stereotype for fun, and tells the golf guys a ridiculous story about John Gotti66 buying an ice cream truck. His prank on Cooz—giving him a mystery box to hang onto and obsess about—helps him reclaim his dignity, and sums up the gist of this rich episode. So much dehumanization is about fixating on externals—surfaces, categories, labels. Cooz just wanted a mystery box that he could show off to his rich friends. He never cared what was inside.
“NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING”
SEASON 1/EPISODE 11
WRITTEN BY FRANK RENZULLI
DIRECTED BY HENRY J. BRONCHTEIN
The Other Forever
“This is our friend we’re talking about here.” —Tony
After “A Hit Is a Hit” put most of the bigger season one stories on pause, “Nobody Knows Anything” presses play on one of the greatest home stretches of any TV season. It’s an episode of portents and bad omens, death and destruction, and a tragic blurring of the lines between family and Family.
There’s an early scene where Vin Makazian informs Tony that Big Pussy is now an FBI informant. It’s notable not just because of Tony’s utter contempt and dismissal for Makazian—a cavalier attitude that surely didn’t send Vin jumping off the Donald Goodkind Bridge, but that contributed to larger feelings of hopelessness that put him there67—but because of the weather and the way the scene is shot. One of the more underrated aspects of the series is how well it captures the Garden State’s extremes of weather. North Jersey heat is like being blinded and punched in the gut when you step outside, and the show’s photography (by Phil Abraham) nails that. Here, the news that one of his oldest and closest friends has turned rat is among the worst things Tony Soprano could hear—at least until he finds out what his mother and uncle have been discussing at Green Grove—and the air around him in that scene looks and feels like doom, with the sky full of black clouds and the wind rustling Tony’s shirt impotently around him.
The news sends ripples through Tony’s entire crew, leading to uncomfortably tense moments like Paulie demanding that Pussy remove his shirt before their unscheduled schvitz.68 But unsurprisingly, it weighs heaviest on Tony himself, particularly in a great therapy scene where he again turns to Dr. Melfi for unwitting management advice. As Melfi details why someone might have psychosomatic back pain, the camera pushes in on Tony, and you can see on James Gandolfini’s face that Tony feels his friend’s betrayal in his gut. He knows it, or thinks he knows it, but he still needs to triple-check it, because friendships still matter deeply, even in the Family.
Livia has less equivocation about positioning Junior to order her son’s murder. We’ve known going back to her Brendan Filone counsel that Livia has no qualms about arranging another human being’s death. And we have ample evidence of how little she likes, never mind loves, Tony. Until now, she’s viewed Tony’s treatment more as an irritation that’s given her license to enjoy complaining. But selling her house out from under her—seemingly keeping her imprisoned in Green Grove for life—is one sin too many, particularly right after Carmela bluntly labels her as a manipulator who’s far more powerful than she wants anyone to believe. And Carmela is proven absolutely right in the scene where Livia walks Junior up to the idea of whacking Tony, even while acting pained to hear it discussed.
There’s a lot of miscommunication here, but also situations where multiple things can be true at once. Makazian owing Pussy money, and even Jimmy Altieri being a rat, don’t automatically exonerate Pussy. Tony surmises at the end that Vin’s guy at the FBI “got his facts crossed” about the informant’s identity because Jimmy and Pussy were arrested at the same time, but his theory has no proof. And while Tony isn’t technically plotting a move against Junior when he meets with other wiseguys at Green Grove, that’s only because he already made his move back in “Meadowlands” and has been secretly running the Family without Junior catching on.
The script and performances keep the viewer in an anxious state of not-quite-knowing. Pussy’s back attack in the prologue might or might not be legit, but his display of agony is compelling enough to make us think Tony and Paulie would buy it. Vin’s long close-up at the brothel as the guys help Pussy down the stairs sparks our suspicion, and the FBI raids a social club where Jimmy and Pussy are playing cards and finds guns and ammo there. As Pretty & Twisted’s “The Highs Are Too High” plays on the soundtrack, the episode cuts between Pussy standing with his hands folded and an FBI agent futzing with a billiard ball at the pool table, and you may wonder whether Pussy is calm because he’s been busted before or because he knows something the rest of the crew doesn’t. Then he flees, which momentarily eliminates our suspicions. And then our feelings reverse again as Pussy gets instantly caught by a smiling agent who seems to have been waiting around the corner, handcuffs ready.
“Why the fuck would Pussy run?” Christopher says. “The guy’s out of breath lifting his dick to take a leak.” Right after that, Vin tells Tony, “He’s wired for sound.” A subsequent conversation between Tony and Pussy reestablishes the question of whether his back problems are legit and underlines Puss’s concern about not being able to continue paying for his son’s pricey college. It isn’t until Silvio shades Vin’s account because he owes Pussy tens of thousands of dollars that we begin to doubt he’s actually a rat. Vin’s suicide after his brothel arrest tragically cancels his debt, but also bars Tony from confirming Silvio’s theory.69 All he has now is his friend Pussy’s word, plus fresh suspicions about Jimmy, who shows up at his house asking too many questions.
“You’re a lucky man, Jimmy,” Tony tells him in the basement, with an insinuating tone meant to flush out hidden motives. “Only a lucky prick like you would get pinched for a gun while he’s out on bail for something else and still be out in time for dinner.”
The episode’s final scene—other than a brief glimpse of Tony contemplating the darkness that’s coming beneath another ominous sky—takes us somewhere we’ve never been before: Mikey Palmice’s house, as he fills in his wife JoJo (Michele Santopietro) on what’s coming next for poor unsuspecting Tony, and Mikey’s own position within the Family. Mikey’s a goon and not nearly as clever as he thinks he is, but it’s striking to see him come right out and tell JoJo what’s coming. This level of either trust or recklessness has no equivalent in the Soprano household. Tony’s machismo and street smarts demand this, but couples’ omertà is a two-way street. We’ve already seen, especially during the evidence-hiding binge in “The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti,” that Carmela knows a bit of what goes on in her husband’s business—at least where the guns and money are kept—and that she’s good enough at interpreting context to avoid questions that could incriminate them both. Tony has never let her in on Family doings to to the degree that Mikey does here with JoJo.
Secrets are necessary in this line of work, but as Dr. Melfi notes, secrets can impose many burdens, physical as well as emotional. If all the members of Tony’s family (and Family) were more open with each other, likely even more bloodshed would result, but there wouldn’t also be this agonizing uncertainty—for Tony and the viewer—about what’s actually happening, and what’s coming next.
“ISABELLA”
SEASON 1/EPISODE 12
WRITTEN BY ROBIN GREEN & MITCHELL BURGESS
DIRECTED BY ALLEN COULTER
&nb
sp; Tiny Tears
“To tell you the truth, I feel pretty good.” —Tony
When the opening chants of Cream’s “I Feel Free” play at the end of “Isabella,” it’s hard not to feel an electric charge. It’s the perfect coda for one of the series’ best and most memorable episodes, capturing not only Tony’s elation and confidence after the botched hit knocked him out of his lithium-induced stupor, but also our joy at watching this show soar so high.
Despite its many moving pieces, particularly where we watch Junior and Mikey plot the hit on Tony while obstacles keep arising, “Isabella” is a simple episode. Between his feelings about Big Pussy’s disappearance (and what it suggests about his old friend’s possible betrayal) and Dr. Melfi’s new drug cocktail, Tony’s a zombie, shuffling around in his robe, sometimes barely verbal, numb to all feeling.70 The depression and panic attacks were bad enough, but at least Tony still could function and feel occasional joy. “Tiny Tears” by Tindersticks becomes a great despondent soundtrack for his new stupor, and the sound department excels at putting us inside Tony’s head by showing him distracted by a clock ticking and water dripping when he should be focused on Christopher discussing the Jimmy Altieri situation. Turning the camera ninety degrees and leaving it there throughout Tony’s conversation with the family’s housekeeper is a masterstroke, capturing in one image how deep depression shifts your perspective on life in a debilitating, unnatural way that eventually seems normal.
Tony’s stuck in neutral, but he roars back to life when the two hitmen approach him by the newsstand. Time slows down further for a few moments as he spots them, making regular speed seem twice as fast when it resumes. The Tindersticks song recurs here—always a sign that a Sopranos music cue is commenting on the action rather than merely amplifying emotion or providing atmosphere—and the surging vocals, about letting the tiny tears making up a sea finally pour out, reflect Tony’s struggle between letting it all out to assuage his mental health, but also to hold it in, because that’s what Gary Cooper (and most gangsters) would do. The chorus coincides with Tony crawling out of bed and going to the newsstand for orange juice and a racing form; the bridging image is a cinematic, low-angled wide shot, like something out of a Terrence Malick film or Twin Peaks, showing the wind raking through the kinds of old-growth trees that dominate suburban backyards like Tony’s. But with the second botched bullet, the driver’s side window shatters, the music cuts out abruptly, and the soundtrack becomes gunfire, curses, grunts, and squealing tires. Tony’s murder of Febby showed he’s not a man to be trifled with physically, but Tony’s resistance is even more impressive given that he’s being ambushed and has to emerge from a deep stupor to survive. It’s animal instinct: Tony baring his fangs and growling, using the car as a weapon while exploiting his would-be assassins’ bad aim. He crashes the SUV moments later, but we know from the cackle he lets out as he sees the second gunman tumble that Tony the bloody-toothed carnivore is back, and Uncle Junior—who already seemed very old, small, and powerless while cowering in the back of Mikey’s car—is in big trouble. “To tell you the truth, I feel pretty good,” Tony tells Melfi later. “Every fuckin’ particle of my being was fighting to live.”
Though Junior’s ordered the hit, Livia set it in motion, but she seems unaware of having lit the fuse—or else is pretending not to comprehend the consequences. “Livia, you understand what’s going on here?” Junior asks her, watching coverage of the botched hit on TV—that is, Do you understand that Tony will figure out who ordered the hit? “My son got shot, and he got away,” she says, a factual report of what happened that takes no responsibility whatsoever. “What the fuck do we do now, Livia?” Junior follows up—What’s the next step now that there’s a possibility of Tony moving against us? “We go see him,” she says, then bursts into tears: “He’s my only son.” Is Livia slipping into dementia, or only pretending to? “Who’s that girl?” she asks Carmela at Tony’s homecoming, referring to her granddaughter Meadow.
Sopranos fans who liked to romanticize the first season as more of a pure gangland saga than in later years remember moments like Tony fighting off the hitmen. But the episode also lingers on his pharmaceutical funk, the grievous and still-present wounds from his childhood, and his encounters with Isabella71 herself, which turn out to be a pill-based hallucination. There’s death and destruction galore, but the episode is largely about putting viewers inside Tony’s head to appreciate how bad he’s feeling about his life, Pussy, and his mother.72 It’s the first time the “objective” evidence we see and hear is contradicted by other characters’ testimony—the first time the show tricks us into thinking we’re seeing something we aren’t. While it’s easily explained by Tony’s meds, the entire hallucination thread is presented with such quiet conviction, and is tied so intimately to Tony’s suppressed knowledge that his own family is plotting to exterminate him, that it plays as real—and of course, emotionally speaking, it is real to Tony, because it’s his subconscious screaming, Your mother is incapable of real love, and she wants to kill you. “Don’t even go there,” Tony warns Melfi, speaking of Livia’s evident ill will, before Melfi has uttered even a syllable on the topic.
If Tony doesn’t literally know of his mother’s homicidal intent, and can’t admit to himself that she means him no good, then deep down, at least, he’s screaming for the kind of protective maternal figure he never had, and will invent one out of thin air if he must. Melfi, in her way, provides some version of that sort of support; therapists often nurture and listen as parents should, whatever our age. In the car with Melfi, Tony segues from denial of his mother’s malevolence to an interpretation of a hallucination, guided by Melfi: in the early twentieth century, Isabella was suckling and comforting a newborn baby and calling it Antonio. “Even if it was the medication,” Melfi says, “this fantasy of yours has meaning . . . Why the need for . . . a loving, caring woman now? . . . Your mother is always talking about infanticide.” Tony tells her that he feels pretty good, and when he finds out who takes a shot at him, he’s gonna feel even better.
But on some level, he already knows. Maybe he always has.
“I DREAM OF JEANNIE CUSAMANO”
SEASON 1/EPISODE 13
WRITTEN BY DAVID CHASE
DIRECTED BY JOHN PATTERSON73
Skyscraper Windows
“Cunnilingus and psychiatry brought us to this!” —Tony
“I don’t die that fucking easy, Ma,” Tony Soprano hisses at his mother as they wheel her down the hallways of her nursing home on a gurney. “I’m gonna live a nice, long happy life, which is more than I can say for you!”
It took him a long time to accept the truth. Denial will do that. Livia figured out her son wanted her dead before Tony figured it out. She believed he was onto her before he consciously was—or maybe she didn’t know for sure, but decided not to take any more chances by siccing Artie Bucco on him, telling Artie through feigned Alzheimer’s that Tony ordered the fire that destroyed Vesuvio. Tony initially takes Artie and his rifle as the next shot in his war with Junior, greeting him in Satriale’s parking lot with, “You took their money?” He’s still in denial, even after hearing it from Melfi and the FBI.
“I don’t know what she told you, my mother, of all people,” Tony says after Artie reveals where he got the information. Then he talks Artie into putting his rifle down, citing Livia’s senility: “I swear to God, I didn’t touch your place, Artie. My mother is confused.” This may be the most impressive and difficult Tony Soprano lie yet. He sells it with total sincerity while trying to talk a tearful man out of shooting him, while grappling with the implications of his revelation: his mother not only wants to snuff him out, but took steps to have him killed.
When David Chase conceived this story as a self-contained feature film, he ended it with Tony suffocating his mother with a pillow. A version of “I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano” that ended with matricide wouldn’t have lessened its power—if anything, it would’ve made the series even more of a 1
999 conversation piece. But it would have deprived the show of a key source of conflict for Tony, and the audience of a great character and performance. And the fact that this oppressive monster once again manages to elude consequences gives the season undertones of futility and deep sadness. Tony can thwart every enemy in his life except the most dangerous one—the one who brought him into the world and was supposed to love him unconditionally.
By this point, Livia has become so much larger than life—for us as well as Tony—that it seems plausible that she could have induced a mild stroke to avoid being murdered, or at least figured out how to fake the symptoms just as she did with dementia. “Dollars to donuts, this Alzheimer’s thing is an act, so she can’t be called on her shit,” Carmela says. Livia’s expression in her final scene is as open to interpretation as the artwork in Melfi’s office and waiting room. Tony wails, “She’s smiling!” as security pulls him away. Is she smiling at the anguish of her good-for-nothing son, or is it the curve of the oxygen mask, or the light in her eyes? This delightful moment is all the more powerful because we had thirteen hours to build to it, rather than the two Chase would have had to play with in a feature. Small scenes like Tony bringing Livia the macaroons, or Dr. Melfi’s many attempts to get Patient X to acknowledge his mother’s danger, added up in the viewer’s mind over time. Tony’s struggle to contain his reaction as the FBI agents74 play him the recordings of Livia and Junior plotting his murder, and his forlorn and self-loathing venting to Carmela, gain strength from all the time we’ve spent with these relationships. We understand Tony, and Gandolfini’s performance, so well that all the actor has to do is blink a few times and shift the set of his jaw slightly to show just how badly all this hurts.
The Sopranos Sessions Page 8
