David Chase was shocked. His show was popular. Very popular. A phenomenon, in fact, and almost immediately. In 1999, early reviews for The Sopranos were gushing, unrestrained – a fact lampooned by Saturday Night Live, and included in Alex Gibney’s Wise Guy: “The Chicago Tribune predicts that ‘The Sopranos will one day replace oxygen as the thing we breathe in order to stay alive’.”
And then, after a few seasons, he was surprised again: his monster, Tony Soprano, was publicly adored. In 2007, at the end of the show’s run, Chase said:
“The way I see it is that Tony Soprano had been people’s alter ego. They had gleefully watched him rob, kill, pillage, lie, and cheat. They had cheered him on. And then, all of a sudden, they wanted to see him punished for all that. They wanted ‘justice.’ They wanted to see his brains splattered on the wall. I thought that was disgusting, frankly.”
It’s true. Plenty adored Tony Soprano. Adored the man who was both murderous and self-pitying. Who was socially corrupting and nostalgic for purer times. The mob boss who nominates Gary Cooper as a model for masculinity – “the strong, silent type” – even though Soprano himself possesses a volcanic temper and the self-regulation of a toddler.
Over six seasons, Tony Soprano martyred himself while his conscience squirmed. He’d personally killed rivals, friends and family – but his maudlin sentimentality stuck. Tony Soprano was above all a monster of hypocrisy and self-denial. But at least he remained a curiously tortured one.
Somewhere, once upon a time, I wrote about The Sopranos and depression. I can’t find it now. But I think I wrote something like this: the series’ pilot is given to a depressed mob boss, baffled by severe panic attacks, who reluctantly submits to therapy. But depression was not only assumed as a subject for the show, but as its sickly atmosphere – the Black Dog’s funk insinuated itself, I thought, throughout the show’s very fabric.
Perhaps I was projecting. It’s possible. But its creator is a famous depressive, and the show always felt familiarly claustrophobic to me. There was levity and wit, of course, but there was also the pitiless accumulation of evil and nihilism. Binge a few episodes, and you can start to smell them. Physically, the universe of The Sopranos was carefully detailed. Atmospherically, it could become unbearable.
Tony Soprano, not least because of the extraordinary James Gandolfini, was like a weather phenomenon. But not the exciting boom and flash of a thunder-storm – for me, he was more like a long spell of oppressive humidity. A big man and charismatic, he was not only capable of evil, but of ignoring the costs of it so that he might commit more – and all the while seeking refuge in exaggerated sentimentality.
Pig-eyed and pig-stubborn, Tony was, like all his buddies, grotesque – and his hypocrisy was pungent. He professed love more than he felt it; desired connection with his children more than he ever worked for it. But if he were a pure psychopath – that is, untouched by conscience – the show wouldn’t have been what it was. The show had many stakes, but perhaps the most compelling was the mental stability of a beast who, at least when he dreams, realises that he’s a beast.
Chase was appalled at how the public adored Tony – something that’s raised again in Alex Gibney’s new documentary. The Sopranos only got darker – and Tony’s transgressions more diabolical – but there was still a good percentage of the show’s fans who celebrated him. The same applied to TV’s next iconic anti-hero, Walter White – another monster, but whose defiance and ingenuity was often celebrated above his destructive cruelty and smugness.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen it now, but I think The Sopranos only got better. The stakes grew; so too the claustrophobia. Tony’s evil comes to infect his family in fascinating ways, as his own deceptions become absorbed and refracted. As murder spreads outwards from his operation, so his family’s capacity for denial intensifies. And, unusually for the time, we had a showrunner who was happy to filter a gangster’s psyche through Freud – and Chase’s own past.
Tony’s fractured psyche is suggested in therapy sessions as it is in the surreal rendering of dreams. Chase was a gloomy prick, but imaginative, and he projected depression and regret in thrillingly strange ways.
*
Alex Gibney is a prolific documentarian, and his curiosity is admirably promiscuous. His subjects include Eliot Spitzer, Frank Sinatra and Hunter S. Thompson. He’s also made films on espionage, corporate corruption and Scientology. They’re typically polished, well edited and made with fine access to the right talking heads and archival footage. But almost invariably, they dissatisfy me: for all of their technical competency, and Gibney’s eye for fascinating subjects, they seem more accomplished than interesting. That is, I find them unimaginative and faintly shallow. Certainly, the eccentricity of his subjects is never matched by their documentarian.
So it is with Wise Guy, a two-part and three-hour documentary about The Sopranos that has, at its centre, interviews with its creator David Chase. These interviews are conducted in a set made to resemble the therapy room occupied by Tony and his therapist, Dr. Melfi – a conceit that’s too cute for me. More interesting is Chase’s disdain when he realises that Gibney is more interested in him than the show he made.
What do we learn in these three hours? For me, very little. Fans might enjoy clips of audition tapes – and consider the alternate universes had actor X been chosen over actor Y. Certainly Chase himself is more forthcoming than he might have been in most previous interviews – but this isn’t saying much. He’s a strange and dour cat, and reluctant to speak about himself (though he does seem to astonish himself with his own “fucking verbiage” here). He admits – as he has before – that the bizarre, depressed and manipulative monster that’s Tony’s mother is based upon his own. But we move no further than this.
I’ll say this, though: with Wise Guy we’re reminded of how unlikely it was that a man who’d worked solely in network television – as a humble scriptwriter on The Rockford Files and Northern Exposure – might become the experimental showrunner of an iconically transgressive cable series with a cast of unknowns. We should be, as Chase himself is, grateful for HBO’s faith in him. “I loathe and despise almost every second of [my career],” he said in 2003. “I considered network TV to be propaganda for the corporate state… Northern Exposure rammed home every week the message that ‘life is nothing but great,’ ‘Americans are great,’ and ‘heartfelt emotion and sharing conquers everything’.”
Wise Guy does capture some of the strangeness of Chase. There’s a clip of him eulogising Gandolfini, who died in 2013 of a heart attack – he was only 51, and just six years had passed since the finale of The Sopranos – and a tearfully faltering Chase nominates two things about Gandolfini that struck him. One is his bashing of a refrigerator in a scene of The Sopranos – though the script had not called for such violence.
The second is Chase saying that he adored Gandolfini when he saw him, resting between shoots, with a wet kitchen towel over his head on a hot day – seeing this, Chase was overwhelmed with the most tender nostalgia. “I remember looking over there and going, ‘Well, that’s really not a cool look.’ Then I was filled with love, and I knew then that I was in the right place because I said, ‘Wow, I haven’t seen that done since my father used to do it and my Italian uncles used to do it and my Italian grandfather used to do it’.”
I’m not mocking the eulogy, God forbid – the man was honoured to speak, and he was obviously stricken by the death of his colleague. But the parts of it that we see are, well, idiosyncratic. I’m grateful for the glimpse. Chase is a distinctive man. “I tried to write a traditional eulogy, but it came out like bad TV,” he said. “So, I’m writing you this letter and now I’m reading that letter in front of you.”
I’ve since read the full eulogy, and his citation of the fridge bashing now makes sense – though it’s strange that Gibney removes its context. “So Tony Soprano never changed, people say. He got darker, and he tried and he tried and he tried. And you tried and you tried, more than most of us and harder than most of us, and sometimes you tried too hard – that refrigerator is one example. Sometimes your efforts were a cost to you and to others, but you tried.”
In Wise Guy we learn, again, that playing Tony Soprano was exceptionally punishing for Gandolfini – as was his being catapulted into fame. To play a murderous mob boss with a short temper obliged the actor to derange himself – through deliberate injury, or denying himself sleep. And there were many times when he wanted to quit. In Wise Guy, his old colleagues talk about dissuading him from quitting over several beers – and reminding him of how many people depended upon him continuing to play Tony.
This was in addition to Gandolfini’s abuse of booze and cocaine, which became so severe that the show’s cast arranged an intervention – and HBO’s front office wrote a new contract making the actor liable for the day’s shooting costs if he failed to show up after a binge.
But it’s strange – as long as this documentary is, it has very little to say or to show. It can’t probe like Dr. Melfi once did, not least because David Chase is even more reluctant to public confession than Tony. Personally, I know of writers who are much better at being charming and felicitous on media tours than they are at actually writing. Chase is the opposite.
There is a casual reference to the “toxicity” of the writers’ room, and the departure of scribes. But it’s glancing. There was an opportunity to explore the guts of making the show – as I’m sure Gibney intended – but it becomes a series of anecdotes, show cuts and actors who seem faintly bored by rehashing their war stories.
Despite its length there’s very little here, and I’ve been surprised by the glowing reviews. I assume the critics’ praise is really a reflection of its subject: The Sopranos was a great show. But you don’t need Gibney to tell you that.