When Warner Brothers announced it was sending all of its new releases this year to play in both theaters and for day-and-date on HBO Max, I honestly thought there was one movie that the studio could just release on HBO directly and call it day, namely The Many Saints of Newark. I mean, it’s a prequel movie to The Sopranos, the prestige television series that arguably made HBO a place for original programming and helped usher in what some consider a Golden Age of Television. If anything could just become a TV movie, why not The Many Saints of Newark?
Regardless, the advertising is making this movie out to be the origin story for Tony Soprano with the late James Gandolfini’s son Michael playing young Tony. That on the surface at least sounds promising.
That promise would seem to be borne out by the film’s opening as the lone returning cast member from the old show makes his presence known, sort of. Michael Imperioli is back as the late Christopher Moltisanti, narrating the movie from beyond the grave, a never seen presence who knows how everything went down involving his Uncle Tony and his own father Dickie (Alessandro Nivola). As the movie opens, Dickie and a juvenile Tony (William Ludwig as a child until he grows into Michael Gandolfini as a teenager) are meeting Dickie’s father Hollywood Dick (Ray Liotta) and Dick’s new young Italian wife Giuseppina (Michela De Rossi) at the wharf. Hollywood Dick just remarried a much younger woman in Italy and his also married son Dickie clearly has some feelings for his new stepmother. However, Hollywood Dick is a high ranking member of the local Italian mob alongside the likes of Johnny Boy Soprano (Jon Bernthal), but the coming conflict comes from their African American muscle/collector Harold (Leslie Odom Jr). This is the summer race riots hit Newark, and while Johnny Boy gets arrested and sent off to prison, Harold finds himself asking why he can’t have more than some table scraps from the Italians.
What does all this have to do with Tony Soprano? Honestly, not much. Tony does have a close relationship with Dickie, but he also tends to disappear from the narrative from time to time. If anything, this is Dickie’s story, and he has many of the same flaws that Tony would have in the main TV series, including a good deal of guilt that sends him looking for advice from a much more moral character, namely his father’s identical twin brother Sally (also Liotta). Sally is in prison for murder, and he’s a much more contemplative character than Hollywood Dick, someone who knows he made mistakes and is inclined to advice Dickie on how to avoid making mistakes of his own. Liotta does a good job in both roles, but like Tony Soprano at any age, we don’t see a whole lot of him.
Instead, this movie is perhaps Dickie’s story. The problem is Dickie is not as interesting a character as Tony Soprano was. He’s like a lesser retread, and Nivola couldn’t hold my attention the way the elder Gandolfini did. Writer/producer David Chase does what he can to make this movie look familiar to Sopranos fans. There are a number of nods to future moments, like how infant Christopher wants nothing to do with teenage Tony, to say nothing of appearances from numerous younger versions of Sopranos characters, even if some (like Carmela) are limited to one or two scenes. If anything, the better scenes in the movie feature the more established characters in the form of Vera Farmiga’s Livia Soprano and Corey Stoll’s Junior Soprano. Farminga’s Livia gets a few of those passive-aggressive moments that made Livia such an emotionally devastating villain, particularly in a scene where she tries to do something sweet for her only son, and Stoll does a great job portraying the general petty incompetence of Junior quite well. Bernthal also puts a stamp on Johnny Boy Soprano, a character spoken of more with a bit of wonder on the show and seen here showing how he handled being married to a woman like Livia, leading to one of the more darkly humorous moments when he showed just how he could get her to shut up for a minute.
But as for young Tony, the movie seems to be suggesting the story being told is some kind of origin story as seen in the last scene before the credits, but somehow it doesn’t quite make sense. That’s the fault of the script here and not the actor. It’s just not there to say why exactly Tony felt so close to Dickie. There are moments that suggest Tony is smarter than he lets on while the life of crime he won’t want for his own children was always there in him. He’s ambitious and might have had an out, but of course, he never gets there. If anything, the script seems inclined to make note of the moments that are just as timely now as they were at the time the movie is set as African Americans are demanding more than what they’ve been given, and a minor theme seems to be black people moving into the areas the mobsters call home, much to the blatantly racist gangsters’ general dismay. However, the movie also ends in a way that suggests the story isn’t over yet and Chase may have been planning a sequel all along. If it does happen, I hope it does more to connect the many scenes he seemed to be trying to turn into something here. There are some good moments in this movie, but it doesn’t quite have the same spark as the old show or the self-contained cohesiveness that a good movie should have.
Grade: C+
0 Comments