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So, having crossed the one-third mark with no idea where the story was going or even where the story had been, I looked up some reviews to see whether the rest was going to just be more of the same. They suggested that, no, pretty soon it was going to change quite a bit. So I was going to dive back in, except for one thing. The reviews I saw kept referring to someone named “Joe”. Joe who? This was one of those movies with no opening credits, so I didn’t know who was responsible for this. So I looked it up, and discovered that “Joe” was what the Internet boys call Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Oh, that fucker! I hate everything of his that I’ve ever seen, so if I’d known this was one of his, I would have given up the moment it was clear that this was more of his usual schtick. Would’ve saved myself at least half an hour.
David Chase, Lawrence Konner, and Alan Taylor, 2021
no votes for Best Picture but rated
#178, 2021 Skandies
spoilers towardthe end
The landmark TV show The Sopranos ran for eighty-six episodes between 1999 and 2007. This prequel is set a generation earlier: the elderly characters from the show are middle-aged here, the veteran mobsters are up-and-comers in their twenties, and Tony Soprano and his cohort are kids and, in the second half, teenagers. So, what critical piece of backstory does this movie, released fourteen years after the TV show ended, fill in? Well, you see, The Sopranos had a supporting character named Christopher, who in the ’00s was one of those up-and-comers in his twenties, and this is about his father, who, uh, never appeared on the show. And… sure, it does stand to reason that if you don’t want your audience limited to Sopranos devotees, you should tell a story that is at least somewhat self-contained, and focusing on Dickie Moltisanti, a character we’ve never seen, is one route to accomplish this. To a certain extent, The Many Saints of Newark distills the show from eighty-six hours down to two, in that its chief interest is in the notion that, hey, a mobster probably deals with a lot of psychological struggles, right? Not all sociopaths are also psychopaths! Some mobsters probably carry lingering trauma from their dysfunctional upbringings, and guilt over their crimes! That was the initial premise of The Sopranos, after all—“mob boss goes to see a shrink”—and that’s what we see here, too. Dickie Moltisanti resents having grown up watching his father beat up his mother, and later, he feels guilty enough about his crimes that he expresses a desire to balance the scales by doing good deeds. But ultimately, whether it’s Tony or Dickie or any of the other mobsters, we are watching sociopaths. The crimes Dickie feels guilty about are “I got mad that my father was beating his new young wife the way he beat my mother, so I murdered him with my bare hands” and “after taking on my father’s new young wife as my own mistress, I got mad at her too, so I murdered her with my bare hands”. And—
—I was about to say that that puts a ceiling on how much interest I’m going to take in a story like this, but while I didn’t get all that much out of this movie when I watched it the first time, I’ve come to appreciate it a bit more after revisiting pieces of it while writing this article. Dickie Moltisanti doesn’t see a shrink, but there’s a similar dynamic to The Sopranos in that he does regularly visit his imprisoned uncle for counsel, and then doesn’t really grasp most of the counsel. There’s an exchange near the end that I think captures a lot of the theme here, or at least the theme that I take away from the Sopranos universe. Dickie has just told his uncle a bullshit story about how his mistress died of pneumonia. His uncle is unimpressed:
Uncle: (flatly) So much tragedy in your life. Your father, your mistress—
Dickie: I don’t even have a picture of her. You know, I–I try so hard…
Uncle: What kind of god, huh?
Dickie: (desperate) I go to church when Joanne wants, I try to set an example for my nephew, I come see you, I do all kinds of good things…
Uncle: You know the Christmas song “My Favorite Things”?
Dickie: Yeah.
Uncle: Maybe some of the things you choose to do… aren’t God’s favorite.
Dickie: (annoyed) …What’re you trying to say?
Uncle: What do I know? (chuckle) I’m a murderer.
That is, Dickie is trying to argue that he can’t be pigeonholed so easily—yes, he’s done evil, but he also does good! He contains multitudes! I did a segment of my interactive fiction show in which Rachael K. Jones brought up the craze in the ’00s for TV antiheroes: “Everyone wanted to tell the story of ‘What if evil guys were complex?’” And I do believe in complexity and nuance and fallibility and forgiveness… but I agree with the uncle that there’s a point at which you have to go, nah. You are not yin and yang. You are not the duality of man. You’re a murderer. But these shows kept having to grapple with the fact that audiences tended to stick with these characters long after they’d slipped beyond the moral event horizon. The creators had to keep adding characters like the uncle to model the appropriate lack of sympathy for these devils.
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