The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  Where Meadow often turns a blind eye to what her parents do, both personally and professionally, she is for once able to see some of what’s going on, as Carmela’s anger continues through their birthday tradition at the Plaza that titles the episode, while AJ—oblivious as usual47—tells her about their mom’s many trips to Furio’s house.

  Tony doesn’t have much time to think about the puzzling disappearance of his top enforcer, because tensions with Carmine Lupertazzi’s Family—and family—have gotten much worse. Here again we see the advantages and perils of getting too close to someone who’s not quite yours, as Johnny Sack seethes over Little Carmine’s insertion into this “de-buckle” when it’s been Johnny at Carmine’s side all these years, Little Carmine likewise resents his father suggesting he would be proud to consider Tony his own son, and even Carmine Sr. gets agitated over the suggestion that Tony presides over an actual Family, as opposed to “a glorified crew” that lives off of what Carmine allows them to have.

  In the midst of the moves and countermoves—Tony’s guys trashing Carmine’s bar, Carmine having the Esplanade construction site shut down—Johnny Sack’s seduction of Paulie Walnuts also ends abruptly when Paulie runs into Carmine at a wedding reception and is horrified to realize that, contrary to all of Johnny’s talk, the boss of New York has no idea who he is. Like Carmela (who also has to flee to the bathroom while contemplating Furio’s disappearance), he has risked his entire life over something even less real than Carmela’s flirtations, and now has to scramble back to Tony’s good side. An opportunity presents itself in the knowledge that Nucci’s bossy friend Minn Matrone (Fran Anthony) hides her life savings under her bed,48 and when she catches him stealing it so he can give Tony a fatter envelope that week to appease him, he murders her with a pillow.49 That death of a helpless old woman—the same death that Tony tried and failed to give to Livia at the end of season one—is the only casualty of the hour, though there’s the promise of another one when Johnny suggests he’s willing to go where Furio wouldn’t, and invites Tony to take out Carmine for him.

  Johnny’s proposal leaves a threat of violence hanging over the finale. But the bigger threat seems to be right in Tony’s house, from his profoundly unhappy wife, who can’t let go of Furio, even after he so swiftly let go of her. As Tony points out the beautiful and independent woman Meadow has grown up into, he asks his wife, “Isn’t that what you dreamed about?” The look on her face is that of someone who has been dreaming a lot about something else—someone else—altogether, then had the dream snatched away.

  It’s maddening on one level that The Sopranos spent a whole season on this emotional affair without consummating it physically, or leading Furio to a more direct confrontation with either Tony or Carmela. But studied anticlimax has been part of its toolkit since at least season two. And how better to put us in the shoes, and heart, of Carmela Soprano, then to leave us also wondering if, like the song says, that’s all there is?

  “WHITECAPS”

  SEASON 4/EPISODE 13

  WRITTEN BY ROBIN GREEN & MITCHELL BURGESS AND DAVID CHASE

  DIRECTED BY JOHN PATTERSON

  Who’s Afraid of Virginia Mook?

  “Just go away, please! I can’t stand it anymore!” —Carmela

  Previous Sopranos years created the expectation that each season would climax with a significant death. Never mind that this was, other than season two, not true: Mikey Palmice at the end of season one was small potatoes, and the deaths of both Gloria and Ralphie were tabled from the end of season three until the middle of season four. (Jackie Jr. was only slightly more important than Mikey.) Perception has a way of feeling like reality, though, and by the conclusion of this, the show’s highest-rated year, everyone assumed—practically demanded—some whacking. Even with Furio gone, there was still the New York feud, not to mention Johnny Sack’s invitation for Tony to take out Carmine. Surely some bodies would drop by the end of even the show’s most muted season, right?

  “Whitecaps” delivers, just not in the way anyone might have expected. Carmine spares his own life when he settles the interstate dispute (despite Johnny’s attempts to get Tony to proceed with the assassination anyway), and the hour’s only corpses are the hitmen Christopher hired for the job, loose ends in need of elimination. But something more important, and shocking, seems to be dead by the end of the season:

  The Soprano marriage.

  No shot ever fired, no knife ever pulled, no garrote ever improvised so far in the show has cut deeper or done more damage than these two simple sentences Carmela hurls at Tony midway through the show’s longest—and best-acted—episode to date:

  “I don’t love you anymore.”

  This is her thinking about all the women he’s slept with while making a fool out of her, all the horrible crimes he has made her complicit in through his gifts and cash and this nice house she keeps ordering him to leave.

  “I don’t want you.”

  This is her thinking of the man she does want, but can’t have, because his fear of her thug husband sent him running back from whence he came before he filled her life with false hope.

  These are not the first harsh words Carmela fires at her husband in “White-caps,” nor the last, but they are the simplest and most direct. She is as mad as hell, and she’s not going to take it anymore, no matter the consequences.

  For all of season four’s other flaws—moving slower, wandering further afield of the show’s most compelling characters, “Christopher”—it never took its eye off the rotting marriage at the series’ core. From the first, Tony and Carmela were squabbling over money, and she was primping for Furio, and he was being distracted by a horse, a new mistress, another potential mistress on top of that,50 killing and disposing of Ralphie, feuding with New York, and more. Other seasons toyed more with misdirection about what the ultimate conflict would be, but season four hides its primary arc in plain sight, because the audience has been conditioned by now to expect Family business to take precedence.

  That part of the story is mostly a bust, by design. Carmine and Tony don’t want a war—only Johnny does, as entitled and aggrieved as his would-be puppet Paulie Walnuts—and they shut it down before things go beyond vandalism and lost wages. But it’s yet another brushfire that Tony has to put out, keeping him from noticing the inferno that’s been building all season back home, and that finally bursts into a full rage when Irina calls the house to tell Carmela about Tony and Svetlana’s affair.51

  The Soprano marriage has always been built on a foundation of compromises and lies that both parties were willing to ignore. With few exceptions—usually when expensive presents are involved—Carmela has never been happy with Tony. She has contemplated cheating on him with Father Phil, Vic Musto, and Furio, but all three men lost their nerve before she crossed a line. She has contemplated leaving him before, wavering the most after Dr. Krakower’s second opinion, but she has always stayed, because it was easier to do what she’d always done.

  The Furio flirtation, though, lasted longer than the previous ones, and came at a time where Tony was being particularly high-handed, capricious, and mean. Furio was a way to escape this terrible life without having to escape Tony. It wasn’t real physically, and barely even verbally, but it was just enough to keep her going: as she puts it to Tony in the most brutal of their many arguments throughout “Whitecaps,” for those few minutes every day, Furio would make her feel like she had forgotten that she was terminally ill, only for Tony’s daily arrival in the kitchen to remind her.

  We are, like Tony, lulled into a false sense of security about the state of the marriage in the opening passages of “Whitecaps.” Carm’s sadness manifests as physical illness, but Tony’s surprise gift to her of the eponymous Jersey Shore house is—like so many extravagant presents before it—enough to change her mood and suggest a happier future. They walk along the beach at sunset, talk about Whitecaps as a place to keep the family together, and if it doesn’t all erase the Furio heartache, or To
ny’s cheating, it covers them over with sand and surf and peace.

  Irina’s call shatters that peace, and in its place is a series of arguments that are theatrical in their intimacy, their ugliness, and the sheer power that Edie Falco and James Gandolfini bring to them: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Mook?

  As exasperating as Furio’s abrupt exit was in “Eloise,” it primed Carmela to be as bereft as she is when Irina calls and tells her, essentially, that any woman Carmela has ever known could abruptly be revealed as Tony’s newest mistress. She met Svetlana, drank with her the day Livia died, and liked her, and now finds out she’s just the latest woman to make a fool of her.

  And that, finally, is her breaking point.

  The opening salvo, when Tony comes home to find Carmela throwing his possessions out their bedroom window, showcases Falco at her rawest and most vulnerable. Carm’s anger and desperation as she hurls herself at her husband and wails for him to just leave her alone are almost feral, while Gandolfini gets to play Tony as more bewildered and annoyed, because he doesn’t understand yet how bad and permanent this could be.

  From there, it’s rueful psychological warfare, not only between Carmela and Tony—who refuses to be kicked out of the home he paid for, and begins crashing in the pool house—but between Tony and Alan Sapinsly (Bruce Altman, a classic That Guy character actor), the smug attorney who owns Whitecaps and won’t return the deposit even after marital strife scotches the sale. Sapinsly proves the easier opponent for Tony. When threats fail, he turns sneaky by loaning Benny and Little Paulie the Stugots and the pool house’s speaker system to harass Sapinsly, his wife, and guests with Dean Martin Live at the Sands, at marriage-threatening volume. Carmela, though, won’t back down, and matters in and around the Soprano house grow increasingly toxic until every past slight and injustice comes flooding out: Carmela’s comment from the pilot about Tony going to Hell when he dies, her growing up around Dickie Moltisanti and other wiseguys just like Tony, and, of course, Furio. It’s the last that finally brings out the animal in Tony, who nearly takes Carmela’s head off before putting his fist through a wall instead. Perhaps even scarier are the two words that come out of Tony’s mouth moments after that punch: Livia’s all-purpose taunt of “Poor you!” Tony once said that Livia wore his father down to a little nub, and it feels like this is what he’s done to Carmela.

  The fighters have to keep returning to their corners to deal with other Family and family issues. Junior scores a mistrial thanks to Eugene Pontecorvo threatening a juror. Paulie is still desperately trying to ingratiate his way back into the crew, Janice and Bacala are starting to get very flirty, while Christopher is out of rehab, sober, and through all of the steps but the amends. (In one of the finale’s lighter moments, Tony suggests Chrissie might be better off skipping that part.)

  But the episode keeps returning to this uncivil war between husband and wife, overwhelming predator and overwhelmed prey. Carmela can’t do anything to Tony either financially or physically, but the emotional combat eventually proves too much for either to maintain, and even Tony’s not stubborn enough to keep at it.

  Each previous season had ended with the family together for a noted occasion: escaping a storm at Vesuvio, celebrating Meadow’s high school graduation, attending Jackie Jr.’s memorial.52 That tradition appropriately ends here, as the season closes on one last glimpse of Alan Sapinsly sitting next to the house that the Sopranos will no longer be buying, enduring the music of Dean Martin, because the family as we knew it has ceased to exist for the moment, leaving a trail of wreckage in its wake.

  It’s not the death anyone expected, or wanted. It’s terrible, and it’s spectacular.

  * * *

  1 It’s here that the series’ timeline starts to get fuzzy. Jackie Jr.’s funeral was on January 28, 2001 (the day of the Giants–Ravens Super Bowl), while this episode is taking place at the end of the summer of 2002, even though Meadow and AJ are each advancing only a grade in school, and only months have passed in both the FBI undercover operation with Adriana and the cold spell between Tony and Christopher.

  2 This was done by slightly lengthening the shots around the deleted shot of the towers, so that the timing of the opening credits wasn’t affected. The decision to handle the World Trade Center this way fit in perfectly with one of the themes of the show: even when the historical context around organized crime changes, the Mafia itself doesn’t change much.

  3 In true Sopranos fashion, even that overt discussion of 9/11 is quickly derailed by Bacala’s confusion between Nostradamus and the hunchback of Notre Dame (“You know, Quasimodo predicted all this.”) and then his conflation of the Parisian church and college football team that bear the same name (“Hunchback of Notre Dame, you also got your quarterback and your halfback of Notre Dame . . . ”). Even when The Sopranos is referencing a national nightmare, it’s got room for jokes.

  4 Introduced silently (and not referred to by name for some time after this): Carlo Gervasi (Arthur Nascarella), who has taken over Jimmy Altieri’s crew, and is in charge of the Family smuggling business at the port. This scene also has Steve Van Zandt’s spectacular delivery of Silvio’s recitation of the two recession-proof businesses: “Certain aspects of showbiz, and our thing.”

  5 The writers had bigger plans for Paulie this season, but Tony Sirico needed back surgery. Leaving Paulie in jail for a while allowed them to film without Sirico, then shoot a whole season’s worth of Paulie scenes all at once after he recovered.

  6 Soprano hypocrisy in action: Tony is unmoved by Junior’s pleas for more money for legal bills, yet when it’s time to scold the captains, he tries to guilt them about the idea that “the boss of this Family” (technically still Junior) is “on trial for his life.” Tony also has no qualms about buying property from Junior for a fraction of what, thanks to Assemblyman Zellman, he knows it will soon be worth.

  7 Janice is back to her old habits here, snorting cocaine and making out with Ralphie in the guest bath of Tony and Carmela’s house.

  8 In the later meeting with Johnny and Carmine, Carmine tells Tony of a disturbing piece of information he heard about one of Tony’s cookouts, and warns him, “Dons don’t wear shorts.” This is a long-delayed acknowledgment of various real-life wiseguys’ grumbling after Tony wore shorts while grilling back in the pilot episode.

  9 Theater actress, cabaret star, and TV fixture Linda Lavin, best known as the star of TV’s Alice.

  10 One of The Sopranos’s most striking contributions to TV drama is the way it redefined therapy more realistically, presenting it as a process that’s not necessarily building toward an all-encompassing cure that makes the patient “better,” and also as a job that attracts good, bad, and just okay people, all of whom differ on what constitutes good therapy. Dr. Kobler is very good in some ways and problematic in others, fitting right into a broadening spectrum of Sopranos shrinks that also includes the ambitious, danger-seeking Melfi, the passive-aggressively scolding serial-interrupter Elliot Kupferberg, and Dr. Krakower, who’s equal parts advice columnist and disapproving rabbi.

  11 Also no-working a long-term relationship: Ralphie, who is spending most of his time with Janice even though he’s technically still dating Rosalie Aprile. Tony is understandably disgusted to learn of the affair—he shakes out his hand after touching one of Ralphie’s shoes like he’s afraid of catching a social disease—and even Janice seems to be regretting her decision after Ralphie cuts his toenails in bed and laughs at her when a stray clipping hits her in the face.

  12 Paulie gets one of the coveted no-show construction jobs, allowing him to earn money even while he’s stuck in Youngstown. Meanwhile, he’s very much working Johnny Sack (or being worked by him) by gathering intel about what’s happening in Jersey, particularly the off-color joke Ralph told about Johnny’s plus-size wife Ginny: “I hear Ginny Sack’s getting a ninety-five-pound mole taken off her ass!”

  13 Silvio’s defense when he approves Patsy committing an additional heist from th
e job site—“Timeline got fucked up.”—is vintage Sil double talk, and a prime example of the off-kilter charm of Van Zandt’s delivery. Sil gets away with things no other member of the crew would, just as Van Zandt gets away with saying things no other actor in the cast could.

  14 Our brief glimpses of Agent Ciccerone’s home life provide a sharp contrast to the various Mob relationships. Ciccerone and her husband, fellow agent Mike Waldrup (played by a young Will Arnett) treat each other as equals, and he gladly takes their baby out of the room whenever Adriana calls for “Danielle.”

  15 Borino got the part from an open casting call—attended by thousands of would-be Sopranos actors—she attended while missing part of her grandmother’s wake. That’s showbiz.

  16 There’s even an argument between Hesh and his old friend Reuben (Yul Vazquez) when Reuben compares Columbus to Hitler, offending the Jewish Hesh, which has no weight at all because we’ve never seen Reuben before, and never will again. It’s just there to make the same satirical point as the earlier scene with Montel Williams’ talk show: everyone draws the line of offense at a different place, always protecting their own culture over someone else’s.

  17 The episode even brings in our old nemesis Dick La Penna for the sole purpose of his overwrought reaction to news coverage of the violence between Native and Italian protesters, suggesting it’s so tragic, it “could be scored with Albinoni’s Adagio.”

  18 An episode after Meadow goes to see Wendi Kobler, we finally meet Janice’s own therapist, who buys into her lies and self-justifications in a way that Dr. Melfi rarely does with Tony.

  19 You would think the show couldn’t top Janice having sex with Richie at gunpoint for kinkiness, but there she is using a vibrator on Ralphie while pretending to be his pimp, only for the whole thing to be interrupted by the Rocky theme ringtone on his cell phone.