The Woodburner Sessions: The Many Saints of Newark

The Woodburner Sessions are a series of columns bringing this Medium page back to two great strengths: the subject the writer in question got good at writing from writing about: film, and going down pop culture rabbit holes as a form of escapism from daily reality living under the [large medical news story of the last two years]. Even if we do end up learning something about the stuff we put into our ears and eyeballs along the way.

After haphazardly moving house with minimal support we were stuck with a preloaded Amazon Firestick, some pillows and a woodburner as the only things in our living room. Turns out there are alot of things the people who distribute these films want you to see and in a particular, if algorithmic, order — because they’re just so good. Well, we’ll see about that. And we’ll totally avoid talking about the [large medical news story] while we are at it. With this express purpose of isolating from stress in mind, the turnover of these stories will make a 20% contribution to MIND.

I’m an unapologetic lobbyist for The Sopranos being at the very top of the HBO cannon. Under advice from about sixty four thousand Medium advice columns and style guides I’m not too excited to break out the five figure word count out, not here, not when you’ve already heard it’s that good. But it is the stronger show; stronger than The Wire, Deadwood and even The Leftovers and you can tell it’s strong because people keep resorting to cliche to describe it and people keep revealing their barely contained befuddlement for its pacing and pitch of comedy when they do.

I’m not sure how an 86 episode long snapshot of the collapse of the last major non-federation mafia family, set against the backdrop of national uncertainty and increased government presence between the 1–2–3 combo of Waco, 9/11 and the release of Borat, peppered lovingly with petty family drama and shot by one of today’s leading hour-drama directors is a novel but novellike is what we got. The Sopranos is so novellike isn’t it? Like that time you flipped open a Zadie Smith paperback and a man in his sixties was getting his head crushed by the tire of a rolling SUV. Where, after the crumbling of Pahlahniuk’s vice-grip on your local book and coffee shop’s ‘recommended reads’ shelf, has a novel been a reliable source of people getting shot in the crotch defending a destitute Newark slum, lying crumpled and cradled by their infantalised, heroin addicted sister, with her sweat reflecting headlight reveries long enough to illuminate a face suddenly sober with grief and terror?

When most of the English speaking world spent the first half of this century’s first decade tuning in every week to reliably feel how this scene made people feel, was it not the kind of imagistic yet measured gratification that the screen has for so long used as a formal advantage over the page? Outside of idiosyncratically hilarious dream sequences, The Sopranos’ cross season plot of a war between a New York and New Jersey crime family came to effectively ratchet up these macarbre images of misdirected class warfare. Only after said butchery had been injected with a healthy dose of its characters’ petty bullshit of course (‘Ole ya fuck!’). The sabotage of this expectation would come towards the end of the show where these emotions would surely bottleneck and the yearning for retributive violence and a huge, stagey showdown would take place for the finale. Sopranos Home Movies, the episode opening the final part of the show’s final season plods about domestic obligation and social aers until the action packed climax of a drunken brawl between two overweight guys in their forties. It’s a piece of coding, though not nearly as subtextual on repeat viewings, that will see out the entire season in (by todays standards) hyperrealist anticlimactic standards, ending with that notorious cut to black. The Blue Comet which depicts the actual war between New York and New Jersey, where paranoia dictates blocking and the shell casings hitting the floor are broken up with people struggling to operate flip phones and talking about car payments, might very well be the best hour of television ever created. Still, it leads inexorably to James Gandolfini’s expressive face shooting glances at the door of Holsten’s Dinner in West Orange, waiting for that cut to black.

The Many Saints of Newark seems to have enlisted every fan, podcast, local news source, union film crew, Tristate network television alumni and up and coming character actor on the eastern coast of the United States. They worked on a film twice the run time and three times the budget of a Sopranos season finale, covering three time periods, two diasporae, christ knows how much heavy lifting with the music licensing departments of major record labels and all to show us that the reason Tony keeps looking at the door in Holsten’s is because he misses his mate, Dickie. Sorry, not his mate, his Uncle, senior by at least 30 years. Despite having a son when in his early twenties at the latest and being killed months later, having only rejoined the Dimeo crime family after a five year Naval enlistment, during which he also appears to be in his early thirties, are you following this? Am I taking it too far? Are you just sat wanting to turn your brain off and forget about the dozens of hours Tony Soprano spent waging a civil war with his uncle Junior Soprano in order to earn the trust of both his father’s generation of local wiseguys and his generation of opportunistic thieves, cat burglars and hereditary sociopaths? Trust which they would then use to approach him about difficulties and infidelities in their lives, so we could better appreciate intimate scenes in which we learn that they were childhood best friends? Did you appreciate the script of Many Saints making these people between twelve and twenty years older than Tony to a man, with no explanation or better use of artistic license? Are you quite content with a plot which sees some of these men get pretty chummy with local Black gangs and street hustlers? Something which was a cause for death, oft remarked upon in the original series?

That The Many Saints of Newark makes such a mess of this time and use of continuity might be forgivable if the temporality of its own narrative wasn’t so haggardly compromised. Conversations circle around actions by other characters which we have already seen executed on screen, action beats are dumped in with a pure sense of obligation (only an early, broad daylight killing of a child hits the same lexis as Chase’s original, flatly realistic murder scenes from the series). Oh and lest we forget, there are entire groups of characters who are supposed to be cutting about at the time seemingly cut because of an awareness that the cameo carousel was getting immensely crowded and that the number of young actors queuing up to do their best interpretations of classic characters was exponentially bloating.

This is a problem easily addressed by leading Dickie Moltisanti, limelight of the Dimeo’s circle of thieves (no small title: they have a cat burglar in their ranks called Pussy), down a path where his interaction with Black, heroin addicted communities could invigorate his moral code personally but violate the codes set out by his organisation. Capable perfomances by Leslie Odom Jr. and Germar Terrell Gardner remind us of the plausibility of shady characters in a community taking on the dual role of protector and exploiter, in a satisfying yet complicated reflection of the role La Cosa Nostra played in their own time and space. So why, then? Why are we watching extended sequences of Dickie trying to set up his mistress (a fantastic Michela De Rossi) with a salon-cum-front? Is it because we are back in Sopranos territory? Where the petty mundanity of everyday life pokes a volatile cast with reminders of just how rudderlessly devoid of any philosophy their lives are? That we’re going to finally watch that spill over into an explosion of violence which justifies the string of deaths which put a twenty five year age gap between many of Tony Soprano’s soldiers? The script has confidence that the viewer knows (along with many other things about The Sopranos) that we are well within the headspace in which a bitterly ironic, dryly deflating set of consequences are what’s awaiting Dickie and by extention Tony (Michael Gandolfini). 86 episodes later, late stage plot points such as Tony’s fits and starts of wanting a legitimate life and Dickie’s assassination being ordered over a moderate social faux pas or two seem to dovetail with The Sopranos’ brilliantly expressed attitude of shrugging acceptance for modern life’s multiplicating yet isolating, grey little realities. After two viewings, however I am none the wiser for why the filmmakers instead chose a wholesale, buy-bulk version of the fetishistic pomp and ceremony of sixties and seventies period pieces, to say nothing of the complete visual and editorial dictionary of a Martin Scorsese gangster flick, replete with banal narration, eyebrow-furrowing timeskips and constant needle drops.

Structurally, the excuse for not wanting to take the plot to places too outlandish is to manage established characters. But with half of them axed and a further quarter of them played by miswritten caricatures, this kind of franchise management shouldn’t have been reserved for a character we know almost bugger all about anyway. When Dickie’s character is allowed to brush up against the edges of the emotions that a stock Sopranos character has, marshalled very well by Allesandro Nivolla’s performance, we see a better set of reactions and circumstances being cued up than any level of intellectual property management could ever devise (though Ray Lliota plays a fairly transparent punching bag for these emotions, just in case.) Emboldened by just two pieces of information from the original series: that Moltisanti men are ‘free with their hands’ and that association with Black organised crime is a strictly clinical obligation (expect for when it isn’t, and then when it is but then it isn’t again) Many Saints crafts two of it’s strongest scenes. Firstly in the death of Dickie’s Mistress and secondly in the insight into the relationship Tony and his mother had before he became another priapic bull of a barrel chested gangster that she arguably had to reign in with equal levels of sociopathy. As everyone and their Rottweiller has suggested by this point, a mini series might make a connection between these subplots that doesn’t require a degree in a HBO show from over twenty years ago. A David Chase mini series would doubtless express this connection as part of a wider web of distrust and petty hatred between smaller and smaller sections of nationalities, then communities, then families, until we are completely alone, going about in pity for ourselves, a great wind now strong enough to carry us across the sky.

Hey, did you know that Silvio Dante (Joe Magaro, SNL impression tier portrayal) used to have a combover? That’s craaaaaaaaaazy.

You can check out the next review in the series here.