Thanks to a friend with HBO On-Demand I finally saw The Sopranos finale. I watched it yesterday, ten days or 10,000 news cycles and alternating waves of outrage, acclaim and, (see Bill and Hillary’s variation), iconic parody later. A week and a half ago, when I realized I wasn’t going to “share the moment” with the rest of Soprano fan-dom, I began treating my delayed gratification like a kind of psychological experiment. How exactly would time and evolving conventional wisdom affect my impression?
Had I seen it “live” 10 days earlier I’m quite sure I would have been among the, “WTF!” crowd hurling my half-eaten cannoli and Sangiovese at the screen and denouncing David Chase for one of the great show biz con jobs of all time. My pet theory had a Livia-like snake twisting through sister Janice’s brain until she was convinced that Tony was to blame for Bobby’s death. (Not that I ever thought she was ever all that passionate for Bobby. He was convenient and serviceable. But getting stuck with the two kids and being left alone … )
One of the great beauties of The Sopranos was that it held out a couple dozen equally plausible and acceptable endings, each so densely connected to well-exposed pathologies, grudges, vendettas, misapprehensions and borderline lunacy that any one of them could have worked and stood the test of time as a pop classic. I hadn’t quite decided if Janice would whack Tony directly, like she whacked Richie Aprile. But at the very least I could see her getting to a place where she could rationalize a decision to give away Tony’s hiding place to the Leotardo crew.
Or, screw Janice … the Russian could come slogging out of the Pine Barrens just as Tony and Phil brokered a peace.
In my theory I also had Tony and Carmela losing one of the kids as collateral damage. It was the high price that I believed Carmela in particular needed to pay for turning a blind eye to the sociopathic viciousness that supported her genteel and nurturing lifestyle. But that was probably just the old altar boy in me. You know, it was like, “Say nine rosaries, make a good act of contrition and sacrifice your first or second born. Now, go my child and sin no more.”
Over the course of 10 days, through the pervasiveness of media and intensity of focus on “the talker of the day”, I had more or less inadvertently seen the last 15 seconds maybe 10 times. The restaurant location, Tony’s shirt, Meadow’s parking job, the onion rings, the guy in the Members Only jacket, the teenagers petting in their booth … each little piece had already entered pop mythology. Hell, home videos of the film crew shooting that night in front of Holsten’s restaurant were up on YouTube.
More significantly, fans and film world colleagues of Chase’s had weighed in with their reactions to the now classic — whether you liked it or not — black-out ending.
Damon Lindelhof, one of the creators of Lost, an imaginative show that basically wasted an entire season — the one before last — trying to figure out how to stretch itself into a long-running TV classic, declared Chase’s choice of the black-out, “letter perfect.” Personally, I thought differently when I first saw a clip of the last seconds. Having invested perhaps too much time and interest in Twin Peaks and The X-Files and been left exasperated at their lazy, haphazard, ill-thought out conclusions, I watched Meadow run up to the door, Tony look up, the screen go black and thought, “A self-conscious cop-out. Way too easy to be artful. In the end even David Chase didn’t know where to turn for the exit door.”
Then I watched the entire hour. Millions of electrons have already been wasted analyzing that last hour. Tony visits Sil. Tony visits Uncle Junior. Tony visits Janice, (on the upper deck of her soul-less McMansion). Tony puts the squeeze on an aged, wary Paulie. There’s a lot of conclusive stuff going down, even before Tony grabs the ketchup bottle away from Hesh the lawyer, who has told him there’s an “80-90% chance you’ll be indicted.”
But three moments stick with me. A couple of them fairly small.
The first is the reaction of the FBI agent, the one who tipped Tony, (while shacked up with his FBI colleague goomah), to the news that, “Phil Leotardo got popped.” He swivels in his desk chair and exults, “Damn!We’re going to win this thing!”
Having orchestrated Phil’s whacking, this suggests other ducks … ducks! … are actually in the order the Feds hoped they would be to close down the rest of the mob with one strategic pinch — Tony.
Next is just a curious shot as Tony enters Holsten’s. First, we see Tony in the doorway. Then we get Tony’s point of view of the crowded restaurant. He’s looking for a booth. Then we get a split second cut-away, almost a wipe. And then we’re back to the same POV as before. Only this time Tony is IN the shot, nestled inconspicuously in a booth in the middle of the room. The effect suggests Tony seeing himself.
Having long since conceded that Chase does very little of this through sloppiness or accident — a lot of perverse why the f**k not humor, yes, but sloppiness, no — I’ve decided it is a shot worth deconstructing. Unfortunately, the best I’ve come up with in two days is Tony’s desire to see himself as “normal” and just melt away from constant scrutiny.
I know. I know. Even I don’t like that one. But it is an intriguing sequence.
In fact, the blocking of the entire Holsten’s restaurant scene is worthy of a film school term paper. We see the guy in the Member’s Only jacket at the bar looking toward Tony. Does Tony see him? We’re not sure. The guy begins to turn away. We get a new angle from behind the Sopranos’ table, looking toward the bar. The family is in focus. The background with the Members Only guy is blurred. But we see him completing his turn away from looking toward their table.
The final bit is a line that hangs with me. It is AJ quoting Tony back at himself, “Try to remember the times that were good.” (Hillary reminds Bill of this in their parody … before she drops a quarter on … Celine Dion?????) Tony has either forgotten the advice or is so surprised that AJ, his screwed-up, depressed, much-too-much like his father child has rallied enough from self-absorbed misery to display a glimmer of adult wisdom that he looks like he’s forgotten.
Whatever. The line could play as fatefully ominous, as though Tony’s opportunities to remember anything are rapidly coming to a close. Or, it can be taken as a less fatal continuation, with Tony perhaps having a great deal of time to spend remembering “the times that were good”.
All the while Journey sings, ” … on and on and on and on …”. Until Tony looks up as the band cries, “Stop”.
So yeah. I’ve come around. It was a terrific ending. Like I say, I can imagine a couple dozen others that would have been so good no one would have complained and most of us would have dusted a place in the pantheon alongside the first two Godfathers and GoodFellas.
But my best guess, a little of which comes from brief conversations with guy a couple times, is that Chase is so proud and iconoclastic that he could not bear — on a genuine artistic level — to let his story conclude in any way that might seem derivative. He played 86 episodes against the “type” of the other 5000 or so mob characters dotting American pop culture. It would have been unnatural and arrhythmic for him to close the curtain in any way that smacked conventional.
By the humor and the middle-class ambitions and anxieties alone, (the mob boss and his shrink), The Sopranos was always on a separate, more personal and modernistic track than Francis Coppola’s operatic mob films. Chase knew he had to take a different door out.
From France, where he fled to escape the blowback from the finale, he told a reporter, “It’s all there.” Meaning, if you care to look, you’ll find enough clues to give yourself an answer to what comes next. (He might as well have added, “if you need one.”)
Your answer, mine and Chases’ might all be different. But on delayed first viewing there’s enough “there” to make any of them play.
Damn, I’m going to miss that show.
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