Meadow punishes herself by cleaning up Grandma’s house—a grand gesture, maybe for her alone, since Meadow doesn’t announce it and Tony only sees it by chance. The key to Meadow’s gesture might be the way she looks at the $20 Tony gives her: this is dirty money. Meadow calls her parents’ punishment, which she herself devised, “so hypocritical, too, when you think how my dad makes a living.” Maybe Meadow wouldn’t accept punishment from her parents because of its hypocrisy. Dad’s a gangster and Mom is content to spend his money and pretend she doesn’t know how he makes it. The lack of respectable authority figures could be devastating for Meadow because, as Janice correctly notes, she’s embracing her biological destiny, acting out and testing boundaries—a pivotal time for her, and a terrible time to be living with parents who have no moral authority.
Richie reenters society to discover the world has moved on without him. He got ten years for dealing heroin, but his old pal Peter “Beansie” Gaeta (Paul Herman23), who used to help him move the drugs, escaped punishment, invested his gains, and now owns three pizzerias. Richie thinks he deserves a regular Saturday envelope as back pay—emotional as well as financial restitution from a former accomplice who never contacted him in prison—and won’t take no for an answer. The violence Richie employs in this episode is sickening even by Sopranos standards, underscoring the show’s commitment to physical realism as well as a half-horrified, half-mesmerized intensity; damaged bodies stay damaged for a long time.24 Richie leaves Beansie bedridden, rods drilled into his bones. He might never walk again. Using Carmela’s phrase regarding Meadow, there have to be consequences.
Unfortunately, often there aren’t. On this show, as in life, not everyone who breaks a rule or exercises awful judgment suffers identical penalties; some don’t suffer them at all. Beansie doesn’t report Richie to the police because—to quote Beansie, Richie, and Tony at various points—they’re “old school” gangsters. Tony doesn’t punish Richie because Richie’s a made man, a captain, and the brother of Jackie, a man Tony loved and admired. He warns Richie to never forget he’s the boss. Richie’s cobra stare and sarcasm confirm that he’s not scared of Tony, just reined in by the power of Tony’s office.25 There’s no logic or sanity to any of this. It’s as if the story is being dictated by a sadistic God.
“COMMENDATORI”
SEASON 2/EPISODE 4
WRITTEN BY DAVID CHASE
DIRECTED BY TIM VAN PATTEN
Con te Partirò
“The ’tude, and the fucking medieval outlook.” —Janice
“Commendatori,” which sends Tony, Christopher, and Paulie to Naples, Italy, was widely considered the first bad Sopranos episode when it debuted. There’s plenty of half-baked ziti on this plate, but the episode has its compensations, particularly its portrait of the Bonpensiero marriage and the strain Pussy’s informant status puts on it. And it’s worth asking what fans expected from the hour anyway, given what sort of show The Sopranos was shaping up to be—and considering how it prepares us from scene one for the Italy trip to be frustrating and mostly uneventful.
The opening finds Tony and his crew in the back room of the Bing trying and failing to watch the new DVD of The Godfather Part III with deleted scenes, and having to be content with Tony describing his favorite scenes from Part II,26 the one where Vito goes back to Sicily: “The crickets. The great old house.” Then Paulie beats the DVD player with his shoe.
The Italy trip itself is a disappointment for all concerned except Paulie, who’s blissfully happy while uncovering what he thinks is his inner Italian. He’s just a rich American tourist with a vowel at the end of his last name, repeating the same handful of phrases, but as far as he’s concerned, he had a profound experience. Chris shoots up immediately and stays high the entire time, never goes to the topless beach or the crater like he swore he’d do, and buys Adriana a gift at Newark Airport after returning. Naples is portrayed as exotic only in that it’s a place other than New Jersey with vague ancestral significance to the crew; it’s depicted as just another semi-important European city with gorgeous old architecture but the usual problems, including corruption, crime, and dirty streets and beaches. “Listen, I’ve been to Italy many times,” Janice tells Carmela, “and really, you’re not missing all that much. The amount of sexual harassment that I was subjected to!” Series creator David Chase gets his first cameo here, playing the long-haired guy in the sidewalk cafe who reacts to Paulie’s “Commendatori . . . Buongiorno!” with complete indifference.
The guys expect a Godfather Part II-style meeting with Zi Vittorio (Vittorio Duse27), an old don whose family is distantly related to the Sopranos, to cement Tony and Junior’s new stolen-car export deal,28 but feel disappointed and disrespected when the don doesn’t meet them at the airport; it turns out that he is suffering from dementia, and (like Paulie) can only blurt handfuls words in a language other than his own. His daughter Annalisa (Sofia Milos29) briefly seems poised to become a flesh-and-blood version of Isabella, the dream woman from season one, but the episode can’t decide whether to treat her as a three-dimensional character or a mysterious, smokin’ hot object onto which Tony can project his issues (and sex drive30). Although they share a few obvious points of connection (e.g., they’re both wrapped up in elder care issues; Annalisa’s situation blends elements of Tony’s relationships with both Junior and Livia), there’s no chemical spark, or even of what Annalisa might represent to Tony, so when she announces a desire to have sex with him, there’s no way to gauge if his “no” costs him anything (although his announcement that he doesn’t shit where he eats rings true).
Mostly the trip seems useful to Tony as a means of getting outside of his own head and trying to think about his business in fresh ways. His idea of claiming Furio Giunta (Federico Castelluccio31), a long-haired enforcer with decent English and zero Jersey connections, is completely surprising, but makes sense in retrospect given the episode’s other major plotline, Pussy’s desperation and treachery, and the destruction it’s wreaking on the local (criminal) community. It makes sense that Tony would clear his head a bit in Naples, ponder all the drama people he’s known for decades are causing, and weigh bringing in completely new blood: an outsider with no connection to anything or anyone except the man who hired him. Of course, while he strategizes ways to protect himself and his end of the business, he overlooks how badly he hurt Carmela by not inviting her to Naples.
The strongest moments happen back in Jersey. Pussy and his wife Angie (Toni Kalem32) are being torn apart by Pussy’s informing, which Angie doesn’t know about. She only knows that he disappeared for months, and that when he first returned home and she heard his voice again, “I wanted to vomit”; that she thinks about suicide now, and wants a divorce. Carmela, meanwhile, is being pushed by Janice (in a scene that makes Janice sound like Livia without malice aforethought) to see Tony as a poisonous exemplar of a patriarchal subculture: “These OG pricks especially, with their goomars and their prostitutes. Emotional cripples. And they expect their wives to live like the fuckin’ nuns up at the Mount Carmel College . . . Madonna/whore’s a full equation, I believe, with clothes, appliances, and houses.”
“You are talking about me, about us,”
Carmela says. “Carmela, no,” Janice says, then says, “I dunno. That a woman of your intelligence is content to ask so little from life and from herself?”
Then this scene—maybe the strongest one in the episode, consisting of nothing more than two women talking in a kitchen—pivots as Carmela realizes she’s being lectured on her lack of feminist virtue by a woman newly dating a made guy. “Marriage is a holy sacrament, “she says, “family is a sacred institution . . . and you, trying to fan the flames with Richie Aprile, of all people?” When Janice insists that Richie’s prison experience gives him “a sensitivity to the plight of women,” Carmela laughs in her face.
Despite many strong moments in the episode, “Commendatori” feels like a missed opportunity. The script keeps threatening to connect Ca
rmela and Angie’s disappointment in marriage to disappointment with Italy itself, perhaps to comment on the dangers of getting hung up on a sentimentalized ideal, or just to underline the sorts of experiences a woman like Annalisa has in Naples that Carmela could never have in North Caldwell; but the episode never quite comes together, despite the strategic threading of Andrea Bocelli’s “Con te partirò”33 throughout. Its seeming belief in the inevitability of disappointment and the importance of managing expectations feels like an insurance policy against viewer complaints. The Naples subplot didn’t need to be a masterwork on the order of the Sicily flashbacks in Part II, but most of it isn’t as memorable as the soggiest scenes in Part III. Just when you think you’re in, it pulls you back out.
“BIG GIRLS DON’T CRY”
SEASON 2/EPISODE 5
WRITTEN BY TERENCE WINTER
DIRECTED BY TIM VAN PATTEN
Total Control
“I’m making some changes.” —Tony
“Big Girls Don’t Cry” is the first great season two episode. It’s Michael Imperioli’s best hour as Christopher yet. It’s a terrific showcase for Federico Castelluccio’s Furio Giunta, exuding Old World charm at a party and Old World ruthlessness in a brothel rampage; and for Tony and Melfi, whose protracted denial that they need to be in the same room again has been this show’s version of “Will they or won’t they?” But more than anything else, it’s proof that what David Chase and company have created here is a world unto itself, its history, traditions, and rules so clearly laid out that it holds our attention almost no matter who’s on-screen. As mentioned regarding “Guy Walks into a Psychiatrist’s Office,” dramatic housekeeping is one of the most important and unpleasant duties of serial TV writers. Extending this metaphor, the first four episodes of season two saw the writers moving furniture around, throwing things out, maneuvering new pieces in, and sprucing the place up; this one is the open house where all that work shines. And it’s a thing of horrible beauty.
Adding Furio prompts Tony to reorganize his crew: he promotes Silvio and Paulie, and Furio and Pussy report to them.34 Tony’s mainly trying to build a firewall between himself and street business—“Feds find an excuse, I’ll do a dime for jaywalking.” But the reorganization has the handy side effect of halting conversations with Pussy before they can start. Tony’s been consistently distancing himself since Junior’s indictment—remember “Toodle-Fucking-Oo,” outside Satriale’s, when he practically sprints away from Richie the instant he starts talking business?—but we can see that he’s especially uncomfortable around Pussy, theoretically cleared of suspicion but still engendering mistrust. The ostracism stings in the scene where Johnny Sack has dinner with Paulie: Paulie makes Pussy leave but lets newcomer Furio (who’s the same rank as Pussy, and dressed as kitchen help35) stick around. “This thing of ours,” Pussy tells his handler Skip at a diner, “Fuckin’ joke. Thing of mine is more like it.”36
The Tony–Melfi therapy relationship resumes after a quasi-comedic period of Elliot trying to get Melfi to admit she’s attracted to Tony’s world, and possibly to Tony himself, while Tony tries to use other people in his life as Melfi substitutes. This week it’s Hesh, a charming, learned man who might be a decent makeshift therapist were Tony to tell him, “I need you to pretend you’re my therapist and just listen.” Unfortunately, Tony never makes that plain a request, and Hesh assumes they’re just two old friends talking and that it’s okay to bring up his own problems. Tony goes to Hesh after blowing up at Janice and Richie37 and nearly killing a random Russian who dared to talk to Irina on the dock, but Hesh yawns in his face three times and recommends sleep, then launches into an anecdote from his record-industry past. But Hesh also drops a bombshell: Tony’s father used to pass out, too. Clearly, a mental health professional is needed, and it just so happens that one calls to volunteer her services.
Adriana gifts Christopher a “Writing for Actors” class to support his screen-writing aspirations. His brief stint is written and acted with such a perfect balance of empathy and absurdity that if you compiled his scenes as a short film, you’d have a perfect picture of who he is and the crossroads he’s reached. The implication here is that being an artist means being brave enough to publicly dredge up and use your deepest emotional pain. Christopher is fine with inflicting and even enduring physical pain, but he runs from the emotional kind, hiding behind hard-boiled tough guy postures that don’t always suit him, and lashing out physically and verbally at Adriana whenever she gets too close to the truth.
After struggling to see through another person’s eyes in the first few classes, he commits to perform the most wrenching scene from Rebel Without a Cause. The James Dean–Nicholas Ray collaboration proves to be an unexpectedly perfect vehicle for catharsis because its hero, Jim Stark, is a wounded man-child who hides behind machismo, and, like Christopher, has father issues. Jim’s dad is still alive but coded as oblivious and “weak”; Chris’s father died when he was young. When Jim/Chris clings to his father’s legs onstage, it has a different meaning than in the movie: Jim is regressing to boyhood and clinging to a daddy who has failed him, while Chris seems to be clutching the father he never knew to keep him from vanishing. (Like Tony with Hesh, the acting class becomes a substitute for the therapy Christopher badly needs.) The subsequent scene where Chris punches his scene partner in the face after he says a single letter (“A”) steers the subplot away from poignance and back toward shock comedy, only to settle on poignance again, with a silent scene of Chris throwing his writing in the garbage.
This is also the episode where The Sopranos flat-out tells viewers that most of the violence is meant to be interpreted as physical comedy, except when it isn’t. Tony tells Paulie about his promotion at the Paterson, New Jersey memorial for Lou Costello, half of the Abbott and Costello comedy team (“Who’s on first?”), and the scene ends with a high-angled long shot of the duo embracing that’s dominated by Costello’s bronze head. Many of Tony and Paulie’s interactions have a bit of a Bud-and-Lou feeling, because they often revolve around social protocol errors and fine points of inflection and language (“Mallomars” is one of those funny product names that might find its way into an Abbott and Costello sketch). In a grander sense, the image befits a series that often sets up explosions of physical violence like black-and-white-era comedy directors staging a slow-building sequence for Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, or the Three Stooges—the kind that might start with two dunderheads ringing a doorbell and end with a house collapsing in flames.
Christopher’s initial attempts to intimidate the brothel workers follow the familiar Sopranos pattern of spotlighting props that will be used for violence—the model car he forces the pimp to sit on, and the paintbrush Chris jams up his nose. We saw similar setup-payoff structures in “Commendatori,” when Pussy murdered the Elvis-impersonating gangster in a house filled with Elvis memorabilia; and in Richie’s first scene in “Toodle-Fucking-Oo,” which lovingly introduces the coffee pot he’ll smash against Beansie’s head. These sequences are jolting, but their undertone of weirdness takes the edge off (as when Tony murders Chucky Signore with a gun hidden inside a fish).
But when the violence is intended as purely frightening or repulsive, the slapstick structure disappears, leaving raw, jagged mayhem—as when Furio rampages through the brothel with a bat, a gun, and his fists. We see a sadistic, bullying side of him he’d previously been hidden behind a cool, even dashing façade.38 There is nothing funny about this scene, just as there’s nothing funny about Richie running Beansie over. The question of how humorous a violent scene is depends on whose point of view it seems to adopt. The gangsters are jocular sadists, so when they’re in full control of violence, it tends to have a grimly comedic edge. Furio’s rampage is all about terrorizing people as an unstoppable monster, crashing through doors, breaking glass and bones. Director Tim Van Patten films the first section of Furio’s assault from behind him, like Travis Bickle’s brothel slaughter at the en
d of Taxi Driver.
The sliding scale of humor to horror in violent scenes evokes Mel Brooks’s definition of the difference between comedy and tragedy: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall down an open sewer and die.” In therapy, Tony expresses admiration for Furio’s excellent work but also a tinge of regret: “I wished it was me in there.”
“Giving the beating or taking it?” Melfi asks.
The scene ends before he can answer.
“THE HAPPY WANDERER”
SEASON 2/EPISODE 6
WRITTEN BY FRANK RENZULLI
DIRECTED BY JOHN PATTERSON
This Game’s Not for You
“I don’t know who the fuck I’m angry at, I’m just angry, OK?” —Tony
“Trust me, this game’s not for you. I don’t want to see you get hurt.” Tony tells this to his old high school buddy Davey Scatino (Robert Patrick39), a sports store owner and gambling addict; but Davey wants into the Executive Game, a super-high-stakes poker game that Junior started decades ago, and takes Tony’s warning as a challenge. Tony and Davey are at Meadow’s school with their families (and the Buccos) for a college information fair, but ultimately Tony ends up schooling Davey on the ugly reality of what happens when civilians tangle with organized crime: one way or another, you end up owing the Mob favors for the rest of your life. After digging himself deep in a hole during an Executive Game marathon that includes Frank Sinatra Jr. (playing himself40), Davey ends up destroying his business and damaging his relationship with his wife and son.
The Sopranos Sessions Page 12
