The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  40 When the crew throws Christopher a post-nuptial bachelor party at Vesuvio, Artie only talks about the food, and the guys seem genuinely interested in the specials. Perhaps Tony’s advice from “Luxury Lounge” to focus on cooking has sunk in.

  41 The brothers-in-law who negotiate with Tony are something of a mirror image of his own relationship with Bacala: in this case, the guy who married the other’s (younger) sister-in-law is the one with a spine.

  42 Though Tony couldn’t go through with it with Julianna Skiff, Carmela essentially gives him permission to cat around while she’s out of the country—which fits with the deal they made when she took him back at the end of season five—and he takes her up on it.

  43 Despite the enormous tragedies life has handed her, Rosalie is perhaps the series’ most level-headed and emotionally strong character. Life has to go on, and she always learns to go along with it. Where Carmela mopes through much of the trip, Roe is flirting with a much younger man (“They got a Belleville in France!”), and when Carm has her own AJ-esque nihilistic moment, Roe calms her down by humming a little Édith Piaf. Sharon Angela is always a delight in the role.

  44 Phil’s pushy, devout wife reminds him earlier about how sinners can repent on their deathbeds and still get into Heaven, so Phil puts tape on Vito’s mouth to prevent him from doing that.

  45 Or is this Phil’s way of telling Vito a secret about his own sexuality—and how Mob culture, a Catholic upbringing, and a controlling wife have forced him to suppress it (other than perhaps when he was in prison—because, as Tony told Melfi, you get a pass for that)—in the only way he can?

  46 The scene owes more than a small debt to the famous Goodfellas moment where Tommy murders Billy Batts—played, of course, by Frank Vincent—after Billy tells him one time too often to go home and get his shine box.

  47 The shakycam scene in the garage, where Tony’s desire to help AJ battles mightily against his impulse to smash his face through that windshield, is one of James Gandolfini’s finest moments.

  48 Meadow, like her mother, proves to have a tremendous capacity for willful self-denial. When Meadow brings up the plan to go to California to be with Finn and his family, Carmela says, “I thought you two were having problems.” “I never said that!” snaps Meadow—who had, in fact, said exactly that to Tony in the previous episode.

  49 There was a long production hiatus after “Kaisha” finished, and both David Chase and the authors of this book consider these to be two separate seasons.

  50 Introduced in this episode: New York wiseguy Butchie Deconcini, played by Greg Antonacci, who starred in a pair of Chase-penned Rockford Files about two low-level thugs from New Jersey. The second episode, “Just a Coupla Guys,” was a backdoor pilot for a spin-off about those characters, and even featured a Jersey Mob boss named Anthony with a shiftless son.

  51 The best moment of that whole plot may be the glimpse of Julianna telling her sponsor all the red flags about Christopher: that he’s married, that he’s in the Mob, and that Julianna nearly slept with his infamous boss, Tony Soprano. “I’m sorry, Jules,” the sponsor confesses, “I don’t even know where to fuckin’ start.”

  Season Seven

  “SOPRANO HOME MOVIES”

  SEASON 7/EPISODE 1

  WRITTEN BY DIANE FROLOV & ANDREW SCHNEIDER AND DAVID CHASE AND MATTHEW WEINER

  DIRECTED BY TIM VAN PATTEN

  Boardwalk Hotel

  “You Sopranos! You go too far!” —Bobby

  “Is this it?” Carmela asks Tony early in “Soprano Home Movies,” after waking up to the sound of cops beating on their front door.

  No, it’s not quite “it”—if by “it,” you mean the point where Tony’s bad deeds finally catch up with him. He’s rich enough to buy a good lawyer, and the charge that prompts his latest arrest is old and weak (possession of a handgun and hollow-point ammunition—fallout from the end of season five, where Tony fled from the Feds’ arrest of Johnny Sack and chucked his piece in the snow, where it was discovered by a dumb suburban teen). But in another sense, yes, this is “it”—the final stretch for The Sopranos, the series. To answer one Carmela quote with another, from the season four premiere, “Let me tell you something: everything comes to an end.”

  The opening sequence of this episode—an off-kilter prologue, really, with an alternate narrative of that “All Due Respect” chase scene that opens like a hypertext link—also echoes the lyrics of the show’s theme: “Woke up this morning / Got yourself a gun.” But this time, it’s a gun Tony that didn’t have anymore—and damn sure didn’t want. The charge, though not quite resolved, looks like it won’t stick, so it counts as a close call—one of many that Tony has endured over six seasons, the most drastic of which was his shooting by demented Uncle Junior.

  “Soprano Home Movies” is largely a demonstration of Tony’s inability to escape being Tony even when escape is the whole point. He and Carmela try to flee the anxiety surrounding Tony’s gun charge and the irritation of AJ’s new situation1 by heading to Bobby and Janice’s lake house to celebrate Tony’s forty-seventh birthday.

  It’s a spectacular place to visit, and large chunks of the episode involve some combination of the four adults simply basking in the calming sights and sounds of the lake, with one scene dissolving peacefully into the next. But whether a Soprano goes to Naples, Paris, Miami, or an alternate reality, they are still a Soprano, and rot follows them.

  While Tony and Bobby sit on a boat in the middle of the lake, for instance, the conversation inevitably turns to business. The two men speculate on what happens if you get whacked. “You probably don’t even hear it when it happens, right?” Bobby wonders. The talk shifts to how Bobby has never actually killed someone on the job (“My pop never wanted it for me.”), and Tony suggests that Bobby may be a more reliable number two than guilt-ridden junkie Christopher has turned out to be. (Chris appears for only a few seconds in this episode—trying to wish Tony a happy birthday before T hangs up on him—which is long enough to establish that Tony has yet to forgive him for Julianna Skiff and any number of other offenses.)

  The episode’s most important set piece takes place indoors, as we spend a long, drunken evening with the Soprano siblings and their spouses, first doing karaoke (Carmela has rarely seemed less guarded than when she’s belting out “Love Hurts”), then playing an epic game of Monopoly that results in hurt feelings over the use of the unofficial Free Parking rule (when Bobby insists that the Parker Brothers put a lot of thought into the game as it should be played, his own wife snorts, “Fuck the Parker Brothers!”), over Janice telling an embarrassing (to Tony) but funny (to everyone else) story about Johnny Boy firing a bullet through Livia’s beehive hairdo, and particularly over Tony’s inability to stop making jokes about Janice’s old ways. The scene is the most purely theatrical thing the series has done since “Whitecaps,” a wiseguy riff on The Man Who Came to Dinner. It ratchets the tension and discomfort until Tony is warbling a version of “Under the Boardwalk” whose lyrics are about the sex acts Janice might have performed there.

  This is too much for Bobby, who has already insisted that Tony is a guest in his home who should not be insulting his wife, and he sucker-punches his own boss, leading to an ugly, clumsy brawl that’s like a sad comic mirror of Ralphie’s death. Tony has always had the physical advantage in any fight we’ve ever seen him get into, but Bobby is younger and healthier (he hasn’t been shot in the last year, at least), and is powered by a more righteous fury than the indignation Tony musters at the thought of one of his guys daring to strike him. In a shocking upset akin to Buster Douglas knocking out Mike Tyson, it’s Tony who winds up on the canvas at the end of this bout,2 though it’s Bobby who then tries to run away, aware of the potentially fatal consequences of what he’s just done.

  “Tony is not a vindictive man,” Carmela tries to reassure Janice the next morning. We know otherwise, and the events that follow prove her sadly wrong—albeit not in the way either she or we might
expect. Tony has never been a gracious loser, and he stews over the various reasons Bobby had an unfair advantage, but he never seriously entertains killing his brother-in-law. That would be a Johnny Boy move, and as season five’s “Cold Cuts” reminded us, it’s Janice who inherited more of that form of the Soprano temper (witness Richie), where Tony is more like his mother than he’d ever want to admit. Janice killing Richie for punching her in the mouth (presented in a sad, funny alternate history to Carmela) was more a Johnny Boy reaction than a Livia one. Livia wouldn’t have shot Richie. She would have henpecked him to death, or found something he loved and taken it from him. What Tony does to Bacala is exactly the kind of dish Livia would have served with cold cuts, where Johnny Boy and Janice both would have gone straight to blood.

  A brother-in-law gets killed, but it’s someone else’s: while negotiating a deal with a Canadian crew, Tony offers to murder the troublesome ex-husband of one of their sisters, and insists that Bobby be the one to do it. This goes against Bobby Sr.’s wishes, and against Bobby’s own gentle nature, but Bobby’s in a vulnerable position where he can’t say no to the boss. The hit mostly goes as planned, but the victim reaches out and rips open Bobby’s shirt as the second bullet is fired, exposing his broken heart for all of us to see.

  In the world of the Mob, Bobby has just improved his standing. From any other perspective, he’s damned himself, and he knows it, judging by the look on his face as he returns to the lake to see Janice, baby Nica, and some friends all laughing and playing like they’re in a laundry detergent commercial.3 This is the life he wants, the one he will go to extremes to protect, but the cabin will be forever soured, because he’ll remember the fight that happened here and what it forced him to do.

  On The Sopranos, when a character compliments another character on bettering themselves, or simply changing, it’s usually a sick joke. “The credit goes to you,” Janice tells her brother, noting how mellow he’s become. “You’ve really changed.”4 Of course neither Tony nor Janice has really changed—they’ve just become more powerful and loathsome over the years, and more tragic because of the glimmers of self-awareness that keep getting snuffed out. The sense that Tony had a chance to really change but missed his moment is indicated, subtly, when Carmela spots a jumping fish (probably the most important animal on this show, even more important than Tony’s season one dream ducks) and Tony looks up too late to see it.

  “You’re a young man,” Bobby tells Tony. “We both are. The world’s still in front of us.” But the episode’s real message can be found in another Bobby line, when he tells Tony that he’s glad he never had to do a hit because DNA evidence makes it so hard to get away with crime these days. You cannot escape your identity.

  “STAGE 5”

  SEASON 7/EPISODE 2

  WRITTEN BY TERENCE WINTER

  DIRECTED BY ALAN TAYLOR

  Spinning Wheels

  “How will I be remembered?” —Johnny Sack

  “Is it possible on some level you’re reading into all of this?” Dr. Melfi asks Tony Soprano, after Tony says he suspects that his cousin, budding filmmaker Christopher, based a hot-tempered, spouse-betraying gangster boss on Tony.

  “I’ve been coming here for years,” Tony replies wearily. “I know too much about the subconscious now.”

  And on that note, let’s dive into “Stage 5,” perhaps the most self-reflective episode of a series that’s already offered plenty.

  The hour is remarkable enough for its richly detailed events, including the premiere of Christopher’s splatterfest Cleaver; Carmela’s confrontation with Tony over the implication, via Chris’s movie, that Tony slept with Adriana; Silvio’s survival of a Mob hit, apparently instigated by New York underboss Doc Santoro (Dan Conte), that kills Gerry “The Hairdo” Torciano5 (John Bianco); Tony’s admission in therapy that he fears Chris has forgotten Tony’s big-brotherly love for him and wants him dead; and of course, the sudden decline and death of cancer-ridden Johnny Sack, who faces his final curtain with fear in his eyes.6 He keeps smoking those coffin nails right up to the end, so stubbornly that even his wife Ginny, who was furious over his unwillingness to quit, busts out a pack at Johnny’s bedside after hearing him call out for his mother. It’s as if she thinks the promise of one more puff might inspire John to turn on his heel and walk away from the light.

  On top of that, there’s a persistent, at times suffocating aura of futility—a sense that individual hits, schemes, scores, and power plays don’t mean much once you’ve accepted the fact that, as Carmela once put it, “Everything ends.” “Stage 5” is the most literally and figuratively funereal hour the series has yet given us, a melancholy-to-depressive installment whose very title is a synonym for death—a reference to a nonexistent stage of cancer beyond Stage Four.

  The characters, led by Tony, spend much of the hour going about in pity for themselves. Johnny dies of cancer. Phil Leotardo talks about his own heart attack, nurses an ancient family grudge against America’s ruling classes (his family name got changed from “Leonardo” at Ellis Island), and worries aloud that he’s compromised too much during his life. Shockingly, he even expresses doubts about the wisdom of staying mum while serving time, and about failing to personally avenge the death of his brother, Billy, at the hands of Tony B.

  Tony himself seems stricken, battered, exhausted. Whether brooding over Johnny’s fate or sweating Christopher’s cinematic hit job (“All those memories are for what? All I am to him is some asshole bully.”), you can tell his mind is elsewhere—most likely, on the prospect of his own demise and the question of whether he’ll leave behind anything but money, grief, and fat jokes. (When the Bada Bing inner circle gathers to hear news of Johnny’s death, a slow dolly into Tony’s face in profile isolates; it’s as if a dark thought has just snuck up on him.) Paulie Walnuts’s toast to the dearly departed consists of bragging that he’s kicked cancer; then he misquotes the Blood, Sweat and Tears song “Spinning Wheels,” which, considering recent events, seems like a Top 40 omen. The Cleaver gets everyone eventually.

  In a speech that turns out to be deceptively important to the entire series, given the man delivering it, Little Carmine meets Tony for lunch, where they discuss succession in an era of two-bit gang warfare and increased federal harassment (the FBI even busts Larry Boy Barese at the Cleaver premiere party). Tony—who wants somebody to step up and lead the New York Family just to end this bloodshed and his many headaches—asks Carmine what happened to his ambition. Little Carmine responds by describing a dream he once had. In the dream, his father turned 100, and Little Carmine gave his father “a mellifluous box,” which the elder Carmine looked upon with “this gaze of absolute disappointment,” because there was nothing in it. His dad told him, “Fill it up . . . come back when I’m 200.” On the basis of that dream, and his wife warning him that she didn’t want to be the wealthiest widow on Long Island, Carmine decided to seek happiness outside of the Family business. The dream “wasn’t about being boss,” Little Carmine explains to Tony. “It was about being happy.”7 It’s also about the foolishness of pursuing wealth, power, and the approval of one’s elders (or social betters) instead of actually living your life and enjoying each day as if it’s a gift—even if it’s occasionally a pair of socks.

  As if that’s not enough to chew on, “Stage 5” turns its mortality obsession back on itself, deploying so many images and lines of dialogue calling attention to The Sopranos as a TV series that the episode doesn’t seem to be asking, “Will anyone remember us fondly after we’re dead?,” but rather, “Will anybody remember The Sopranos as anything but a blood-and-guts gangster show?”

  There are warnings of the dangers of overinterpretation that seem like intentional retorts to Tony’s remark to Melfi, and to critics like the ones who wrote this book. Christopher wriggles away from charges that he based the film’s Mob boss villain (played by Daniel Baldwin8) on Tony by having JT Dolan attribute it to the Broderick Crawford character in Born Yesterday (who also mem
orably wore a robe). Whether Chris intended the comparison or not, he damn sure did it on purpose, yet he begs off responsibility, insisting that creativity is a mysterious thing. “It was an idea, I don’t know, who knows where they fucking come from? Isaac Newton invented gravity cuz some asshole hit him with an apple!” he tells poor JT, before braining him with a Humanitas prize. Then there’s the bit where an unseen viewer’s TV reveals Geraldo Rivera interviewing Mob experts9 about the current New York Mob madness. The panel bets on possible replacements for Johnny with the same jocular attitude you used to find in conversations during the original run of The Sopranos about who was going to get whacked next (which in turn echoes a comment about Cleaver, “These audiences today, they want blood.”). The punch line: a reverse angle revealing that the TV belongs to none other than Elliot Kupferberg, who has gone full Mob fanboy over the years. (“This Santoro thing, I called it a year ago!”) Carmine praises his own film’s cleverness, particularly a close-up of a crucifix and a vaudevillian hanging from a rearview mirror. (“The sacred and the propane,” Carmine malaprops.) And let’s not forget Gerry the Hairdo’s interpretation of Phil’s heart problems as “a metaphor. He lost his balls is what I’m saying.” (If so, it’s a metaphor for a metaphor.)

  Is this evidence that the writers sometimes worry that detractors are right: The Sopranos really is a whack-’em gangster soap gussied up in academic pretension? In scenes like the one with Little Carmine and Tony’s lunch—where the gangster-gone-Hollywood Carmine orders seared ahi, mixed greens, and an iced tea, and Tony orders a Philly cheesesteak—you gotta wonder.