Review of 'The Many Saints of Newark'

After all of these years -- 21 or 14, depending on whether you count from the beginning or the end -- The Sopranos is arguably still the best series ever on any kind of television screen. What's beyond argument is that The Sopranos started it all, and opened the gates, paved the way, for all the great television that ensued on cable and streaming screens.

It certainly changed my life, all for the better, not only as a viewer but a media scholar thinking and writing about television. The late David Lavery asked me to write an essay about The Sopranos just a few years into the series for an anthology he was putting together. The result was "Naked Bodies, Three Showings a Week, No Commercials: The Sopranos as a Nuts-and-Bolts Triumph of Non-Network TV" in This Thing of Ours: Investigating The Sopranos published by Columbia University Press and Wallflower Press in 2002. His next good idea was to organize a conference on The Sopranos, which I did at Fordham University with David and Douglas Howard's help in 2008. Lots of important things came out of that conference, including a nice long interview with Dominic Chianese, and another anthology, The Essential Sopranos, chock full of essays, including my "The Sopranos and the Closure Junkies," published by University of Kentucky Press in 2011. And just for good measure, I was interviewed for "Defining a Landmark," a documentary on The Sopranos included in The Sopranos: The Complete Series, brought out by HBO on blu-ray in 2014.

So now that we've got my creds out of the way, what about the movie?

Well, with The Many Saints of Newark, just up on HBO Max for the month of October, that 2014 blu-ray package is no longer complete. The two-hour movie thus had everything to lose for David Chase, if it didn't live up to the extraordinary series to which it has the temerity of being a prequel. Anything short of loving it would have made it a disappointment.

And I just saw it, and I loved it. For lots of reasons.

One of the great joys in seeing a prequel is getting to know the younger selves of characters you came to know and prize in their primary presentations. Michael Gandolfini was an inspired choice to play Tony Soprano as a teenager. Not only did he look and sound like the adult Tony played by his father James, Michael had a perfect presentation of lines, the mix of mischief and disappointment, and the beginning of that short fuse to anger that animated his father.

And Michael Gandolfini is by no means the only actor who delivered memorably recognizable performances in The Many Saints of Newark. Among my favorites are John Magaro, whose young Sylvio not only had the toupe (of course, and preceded by a comb over for his even younger self) but had the scowl and literally walked the walk as well as talked the talk. The same for Corey Stoll as Uncle Jun, not the toupe (of course) but in every way the bespectacled uncle of Tony. And Vera Farmiga was so convincing as Livia -- the intensity of her gaze, the angle of her head -- she was recognizable as Tony's mother before anyone spoke her name.

And there was great work in this movie as well by actors playing characters who weren't in the original series. My favorite of these was Alessandro Nivola, who did a stand-out job as Dickie Moltisanti, Christopher's father.

Now as to the plot. It was strong, believable, and fleshed out in classic Sopranos detail. And there's a stunning revelation at the end, which I won't say anything about except it was thoroughly plausible given what we know of the character in later life on The Sopranos.

I'll also mention that the movie was studded with gems of fine touches, like baby Christopher Moltisanti crying when he sees Tony as a pouty young boy (William Ludwig), and an old biddy remarking that some people think that newborns have knowledge of "the other side" (as Christopher in a narration from the grave reminds us earlier in the film, Tony killed him). It was also a nice touch saving the iconic "Woke Up This Morning" for the closing rather than the opening of the movie, since the song was an entree to The Sopranos.

So here's my recommendation: If you've seen The Sopranos, see The Many Saints of Newark, you'll enjoy it immensely. If you haven't seen The Sopranos, see the entire series, then see the prequel movie. You'll enjoy it immensely.