The architecture of the Tony–Livia relationship is astonishingly intricate in retrospect. It’s driven not just by straightforward dialogue and definitive actions but subtle psychological and literary details, including the recurring talk of infanticide, Tony’s two dreams about mother figures (the duck and Isabella), and the way that the idea of asphyxiation is woven through the season. Tony feels suffocated by his mother; the resultant panic attacks make him feel like he’s suffocating; he now intends to deal with the problem by suffocating his mother (poetic justice), but arrives to find her lying on a gurney, a plastic mask on her face providing constant oxygen. (“That woman is a peculiar duck,” Carmela tells Tony. “Always has been.”)
In this whack-fest of an episode, which claims Jimmy the rat in a hotel room and Mikey Palmice in the woods,75 Junior escapes Tony’s wrath through sheer dumb luck: a U.S. attorney secures indictments against Junior and has him arrested along with fifteen other gangsters. The indictments are for white collar crimes that Tony wasn’t involved in, and have nothing to do with the string of murders committed in his move against Junior, one of which (Chucky Signore) he carried out personally. But he’s still an apple from a poisoned tree. The only reason we don’t think he’s as monstrous as his mother is because Livia is relentlessly sour and conniving (with occasional bursts of tearful self-pity), whereas the writers (and Gandolfini) keep indicating that there are redemptive qualities in Tony, such as his affection for his wife and kids (inconsistent and compromised as it is), his loyalty to his men (the loyal ones, anyway), his attachment to the ducks, his sharp sense of humor, and his vulnerability with Melfi.
It’s Melfi, of course, who gets Tony to finally realize the true source of the plots against him. The two therapy sessions in this episode amount to a toxic explosion and a subsequent cleanup. “You don’t want to go there,” Tony warns Melfi at first, his voice and face leaving some doubt about who he’s talking about when he says that he knows who hired the hitmen.
“Maybe you don’t want to go there,” Melfi says, shifting into that mode we first encountered in “Meadowlands” where she sounds like a literary critic looking for deeper meanings in her favorite show. She lays it all out for him, something therapists don’t do except in extraordinary circumstances, such as, er, a patient’s life being in danger. Tony’s response when Melfi pushes him too far terrifies us and her, as this confident, smart, strong character seems tiny and weak with the bear that is Tony Soprano looming over her, profanely expressing his displeasure at her diagnosis of Livia. Here, though, as is always the case, Melfi keeps her composure. It isn’t until Tony storms out that she lets her guard down and barricades the door.
The finale plays as if Chase and company spent months setting up an elaborate domino design, then began knocking them over to create something beautiful in the destruction.76 Even the moves that don’t work out for Tony—Livia’s stroke, or Junior’s lifesaving arrest—have a haunting twist, like Junior silently accepting that he was never actually boss of the Family. And as we’ve discussed going back to “College,” it’s striking how much happier and more at peace Tony seems whenever he’s on the verge of killing somebody. Look at Tony during the meeting with the captains: a man who has just made small talk with two men whose murders he is in the process of arranging, and he couldn’t be more pleased about it. Or look at how giddy he is—even his wife and kids make note of it—in the kitchen on the morning he thinks his guys are going to take down Junior’s whole crew. This is the best part of his job, perhaps of his entire miserable life. Silvio torching Vesuvio, a scheme that could have been long forgotten, comes into play when Livia weaponizes Artie. The episode even climaxes Charmaine’s arc when she tells Artie that she didn’t go out and bury the hatchet with Carmela because she doesn’t want the new Vesuvio to become “a Mob hangout” like the old one.
Artie’s dilemma obviously lacks the dramatic heft of Tony’s conflicts. But the episode ably uses him, Carmela, Father Phil, and even Dr. Melfi to illustrate what life is like living in Tony Soprano’s shadow. Artie struggles at first with telling the insurance company about the arson revelation, but eventually chooses the path that benefits him most, letting Charmaine’s happiness with the new place overwhelm his resentment, then mealy-mouthing about being a “yes” person rather than a “no” person. Father Phil seems dismayed by Artie’s justifications, but any self-righteousness he might’ve felt is punctured when Carmela calls him out as a hypocrite, noting the joy he takes in acting as a surrogate husband for Mob wives (or, in Rosalie Aprile’s case, Mob widows). That Carmela only is able to—or, perhaps, willing to—articulate this to Phil after seeing him touch Rosalie’s hand shows that she’s not without great flaws herself. But she also knows where her money comes from and where her loyalties must lie. When she’s comforting Tony about the Livia news, she listens as he openly discusses his plans to take out Junior and Mikey—a Mikey-and-JoJo level of frankness—and doesn’t flinch. This is the business she has chosen to marry into.
The season concludes with both of Tony’s families, biological and professional, waiting out a torrential downpour at Vesuvio.77 Tony makes a toast. In hindsight, it seems not just to celebrate his recent winning streak, but also to celebrate the impressive season of television that just concluded, and predict the wave of antihero-driven series that would appear in the wake of The Sopranos’s first year: “To my family. Someday soon, you’re gonna have families of your own. And if you’re lucky, you’ll remember the little moments, like this, that were good.”
* * *
1 Chase had written for some of the most acclaimed dramas of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, including the wisecracking private eye series The Rockford Files, the whimsical Alaskan odyssey Northern Exposure, and the Civil Rights–era drama I’ll Fly Away. He was fed up with television when he wrote the pilot; he’d hoped HBO would decline it, so he could film a second hour for a movie and take it to Cannes.
2 Sirico played Tony Stacks in Goodfellas, one of the hoods who sticks a mail carrier’s head in a pizza oven. If Paulie Walnuts seemed more authentic than some of the show’s other crooks, it’s because Sirico had a real criminal past. He was arrested twenty-eight times, starting at the age of seven when he stole nickels from a newsstand, and did prison stints for armed robbery and a weapons charge. Sirico claims he was inspired to try another profession when an acting troupe visited prisons where he was incarcerated. By the time he appeared in Goodfellas, he’d landed twenty-seven film roles and died in thirteen of them, including James Toback’s Fingers, in which he perishes after a fist and knife fight with Harvey Keitel that sends both men tumbling down forty feet of stairs. He was shot in the leg and back when a rival hood caught Sirico kissing his girlfriend on the steps of a church. He used to don elaborate disguises before committing robberies, and once got busted for sticking up the same place twice while wearing the same blond wig.
3 A Goodfellas alum unceremoniously billed as “Man with Coatrack,” Pastore’s previous TV and film roles were almost all wiseguys.
4 The most prominent of the show’s many Goodfellas alums, Bracco first gained fame therein playing Henry Hill’s wife Karen, then struggled for worthy follow-ups in films like Medicine Man and Radio Flyer.
5 To lifelong Jerseyans, the route Tony takes from the Lincoln Tunnel to his house in North Caldwell makes no sense if he’s going directly home, as he winds his way all around the Meadowlands, over by the Holland Tunnel, and into various other parts of Hudson, Passaic, and Essex Counties. But if the credits are meant to reflect a day where he’s stopping by various Family-affiliated business (the sanitation company, for instance, is located in the shadow of the Pulaski Skyway, which he passes at one point), then it makes sense, even as most locals are inclined to yell at him to just hop on Route 3 West.
6 The Soprano house is located in North Caldwell, New Jersey. It was used for both interiors and exteriors during production of this pilot, but afterward for exteriors only. Interiors were reproduced exa
ctly on a soundstage at Silvercup Studios in Long Island City, Queens. The backgrounds we see through the windows are high-resolution slides of the North Caldwell property projected on enormous screens.
7 Gandolfini’s most memorable roles prior to the series tended to be small ones as tough guys: the True Romance thug who fights Patricia Arquette in the bathroom, one of the submarine crew in Crimson Tide, the bearded stuntman John Travolta beats up in Get Shorty.
8 Marchand spent five seasons starring as Lou Grant’s wealthy newspaper owner Mrs. Pynchon and played Clara in the original live-TV version of Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty, opposite Rod Steiger.
9 Falco had spent three seasons on HBO’s first original drama series, Oz, playing the supporting role of prison guard Diane Whittlesey. Oz boss Tom Fontana graciously released her when a larger role on HBO presented itself.
10 In the pilot, Irina is played by Siberia Federico; thereafter, by Oksana Babiy (also credited as Oksana Lada).
11 Another Goodfellas alum (he played Joe Pesci’s repeat victim Spider) and frequent Spike Lee collaborator, Imperioli is also the only Sopranos regular who got to write for the show.
12 Where Goodfellas tended to be a more frequent casting well for The Sopranos to dip into, it did occasionally reach further back to the Godfather franchise, particularly with Chianese, who played Hyman Roth’s henchman Johnny Ola in the second film.
13 Not to be confused with “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero from Tony’s crew.
14 Both Artie and Silvio Dante are presented in the pilot as old friends Tony rarely sees anymore (everyone’s surprised when Sil comes by the pork store). From episode two on, Sil is treated as a long-standing member of Tony’s own crew, and Vesuvio as every local wiseguy’s restaurant of choice.
15 After failing to sway either Junior or Artie—whose law-abiding wife Charmaine (Kathrine Narducci ; Narducci auditioned her son for a role in A Bronx Tale and got cast as the hero’s mother, her big break. Her mobster father died in a hit when she was ten.) won’t allow him to use the sketchy cruise ship tickets Tony gave them while trying to close the restaurant at the time of the hit—Tony has Vesuvio blown up, figuring that will damage its reputation less in the long run.
16 AJ will have many memorable moments throughout the series—some, but not all, fart-related—but if you’re new to the show while reading this, be warned that he definitely peaks with the ziti line.
17 Though Paul Schulze would play Father Phil for the rest of the series, the role here is briefly filled by Michael Santoro.
18 The Sopranos makes several references to Tony being the boss of North Jersey. “46 Long” walks that back a bit, to show that the ill Jackie Aprile Sr. (played by Michael Rispoli, the runner-up to Gandolfini for the role of Tony) is acting boss of the Family, even as Brendan notes that everyone knows that Tony is really running things since Jackie became “the chemo-sabe.”
19 Van Zandt was the other runner-up to play Tony, but is far more famous for his other life as a core member of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band and a prolific musician on his own.
20 Blabbermouth.
21 “Just when I thought I was out . . . they pull me back in!”
22 “I’m fuckin’ Rockford over here,” Pussy complains about the assignment, as a wink to Chase’s time on The Rockford Files.
23 Livia’s casual racism comes out when she refers to her housekeeper as a titsun, the Italian equivalent of the N-word.
24 Another expression of the malaise affecting everyone in this episode: after Tony exits the frame, the camera refocuses on three dancers on the stage behind him, so uninterested in their present circumstance that they can barely bring themselves to move.
25 Shlomo is played by Chuck Low, whose Hasidic accoutrements render him almost unrecognizable as wig salesman Morrie (“Morrie’s wigs don’t come off!”) from Goodfellas.
26 Then she adds, “He put up my storm windows for me one year.” Classic Livia: her affection for Chris isn’t about who he is, but what he does for her. That scene also returns to a recurring theme of the series: these people expect minor good deeds to pay dividends forever. Junior wants deference from Tony because of all the times they played catch.
27 De Matteo had a tiny role in the pilot as a restaurant hostess; when it came time to cast Adriana, she was brought back in and restyled, and a line of dialogue was later added to explain that Tony got her that hostessing job.
28 The one Tony–Livia scene this week (other than her brief cameo in Melfi’s clothes in the dream sequence) is a delight, particularly when Tony notes that he visits her to get cheered up and asks, “You think that’s a mistake?” Sadly, this is about the best he can hope for from an encounter with his mother: a minimum of yelling, and Livia in her incredibly roundabout way asking him to leave a few of the macaroons for her—not that she’d ever admit that is what she’s doing.
29 Heard, who died the year this book was being written, was a great character actor who starred in a lot of small-scale, “best-kept secret” movies, including Between the Lines, Cutter’s Way, After Hours, and Rambling Rose. Vin is one of the show’s best-drawn recurring characters, made immediately vivid by the script and by Heard’s performance as a self-destructive loser who can’t admit what he’s become.
30 The Sopranos tradition of acknowledging its screen-gangster predecessors mainly to show how the Jersey boys come up short continues here. The way Tony drops the staple gun on the street after using it on Mikey is a petty, nonlethal reenactment of the moment in The Godfather where Michael Corleone assassinates corrupt police captain McCluskey and his Mob ally Sollozzo. We also hear Christopher—a young hothead who, unlike the older guys, has never been “to the mattresses”—agitating for a hot war with Junior’s crew (and misremembering details) “This is Scarface, final scene, fuckin’ bazookas under each arm! ‘Say hello to my little friend!’”
31 Tony continues his lie of omission to Carmela about Dr. Melfi’s gender.
32 This might be Bracco’s peak thus far. Her performance in the scene where she and Tony discuss strategy lets us see that Melfi is becoming wrapped up in the crime drama that she insists she’d rather not be privy to, even as her measured demeanor and precise language stops just short of actively participating in Tony’s schemes. Even the most inappropriate conversations can become permissible if you classify them as thought experiments.
33 Norman Bates was played by Anthony Perkins. Tony is short for Anthony.
34 Schulze, who replaces Michael Santoro, was an old friend and collaborator of Edie Falco’s. They attended SUNY Purchase together, and had acted together many times on stage and screen (and would continue to do so for years after The Sopranos ended, as toxic lovers on Showtime’s Nurse Jackie). There’s a shorthand and chemistry between them beyond the nearly romantic that’s enormously valuable for a story that has to push their relationship to its outer edges at a point in the series when we barely know either character.
35 We can see this in the scenes where Febby tracks Tony, visiting the motel and the restaurant and asking a garage worker if a man fitting Tony’s description has been looking for him: those old mobster muscles are springing to life again.
36 A detail that dovetails with the gangsters’ generalized disgust at Italian culture being watered down or erased.
37 “Sweet soul, take heed, / Take heed of perjury; thou art on thy deathbed.” Othello to Desdemona as he’s strangling her; Othello, Act V, Scene II.
38 Tony is killing a version of himself here. When Febby and his wife call out to their child, it’s a daughter who might’ve grown up to tour colleges with her own dad someday, as Meadow is doing. Tony’s conversations with Meadow about his business, however guarded, give us a sense of a man who, like Febby, was born into a particular life and can’t get out of it.
39 Father Phil is a hardcore cinephile. You can tell because when Carmela mentions Casablanca, he goes immediately to the quality of the new print.
40 The camera tilts to one side a
s it follows the priest to the bathroom, as if the episode itself is drunk.
41 Another point of connection between Tony and Father Phil is the way they bring their values, their code, and even their rituals with them no matter where they are.
42 Father Phil tells her exactly what she needs to hear about repenting and renouncing sin, even as we can suspect this is Carmela’s momentary burst of remorse before she returns to enjoying the benefits of being a made guy’s wife. By the next morning—after Father Phil is saved from a second moment of temptation by a stomach too full of pasta and alcohol—Carmela has, indeed, reverted to type. She couldn’t have been more vulnerable in her confession, nor could she be any colder or more in control as Phil stumbles around in his undershirt trying to apologize for his behavior.
43 The correct quote is, “No man can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true”—as in, “the true face.”
44 Tony’s response to Melfi’s question about a prostate exam to explore his erectile issues—“Hey, I don’t let anybody wag their finger in my face”—is one of his most intentionally funny lines of the whole series, and Melfi’s full-throated laugh in response is a delight. Tony wonders at one point why she took him on as a patient, but it’s clear she genuinely enjoys his company much of the time.
45 Lorraine Bracco’s body language after she rejects Tony’s kiss and then literally stands up to him is exactly right. She doesn’t step back even though he’s at kissing distance, because that would indicate fear, but at the same time, she gives him nothing that would indicate even a tiny chance of reciprocation.
The Sopranos Sessions Page 9
