The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  Compared to some prominent new characters of seasons past (or even of Feech in the previous episode), Tony B gets an understated introduction. We see that he’s a reflexive ballbreaker, unable to resist making fun of, say, Artie for going bald, and the sensitive Tony can’t help feeling mocked by Tony B’s impression of Jackie Gleason’s old Reginald Van Gleason III character11 (“Boy, are you fat!”). It’s only when the two Tonys are in the Satriale’s parking lot—Tony Uncle Johnny getting high-handed about being the boss, an authority figure Tony Uncle Al should never joke about in public—that we get a hint of the dangerous man Tony B once was. “You’re crowding me,” Tony B says, with just the right shade of malice. But despite the insistence of Uncle Junior12 that all the Class of 2004 graduates are “old rats on a new ship,” Blundetto seems determined to chart his own course, to the surprise of both Tony and the audience.

  The episode’s title refers to its many non–Tony B subplots, as we get our most extended glimpse of the FBI’s operation since the season three premiere. In one early sequence, we tour the New Jersey field office, where Ray Curto is meeting with his handler, Sanseverino is watching surveillance footage from the Crazy Horse parking lot camera, and Special Agent Cubitoso is listening to a recording of Tony made by construction company boss Jack Massarone (Robert Desiderio), who supervises work at the Esplanade. It’s at once an impressive display of how far the Bureau’s tentacles reach and a reminder of just how hard it is to make a case against these guys. Ray is clearly stringing the Feds along while trying to make money off the deal.13 Massarone gets exposed as a rat and stuffed into the trunk of a car, and while Adriana’s interest in cooperating vacillates throughout the episode, she’s so far removed from the action that her intel is only vaguely useful.

  Massarone briefly gets in tight with Tony when they realize they both hate their mothers, and seals the deal with a painting of Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack friends (Tony, as we know, is a sucker for art depicting things he already likes), but gets in trouble when a cop on the Family payroll tells Patsy that an FBI car was surveilling their meeting, and dooms himself through a nervous bit of flattery, asking a suspicious Tony if he’s lost weight. Tony’s already bitter about the whole thing—“Can’t a guy be fuckin’ nice anymore?” he asks, while thinking about the painting—and also on edge about his size thanks to Tony B’s Gleason schtick. Tony may be self-delusional about a lot of things, but he knows he’s not getting thinner, and that’s enough—after some deliberations that baffle his underlings (Sil to Chris: “Tony’s got his own process.”)—to sentence Massarone to death.

  Adriana’s end of things involves her coming to grips with the consequences of her informing. Early on, she meets Sanseverino and another agent in a car and answers their questions about a murdered wiseguy; when one of her responses sends the second agent sprinting out of the car, it’s the first time Ade has felt the tangible impact of what she does, and she spends the rest of the hour wrestling with guilt. Sanseverino tries to assure her that she’s working for the good guys now, telling Ade that she joined the FBI after her sister was paralyzed by a stray bullet from an illegal firearm, and the story briefly does its job. But movie nights14 with the Mob wives wear on her, particularly when mention of Angie Bonpensiero illustrates how despised both informants and their wives become. On the verge of confessing her sins—“I’m not what you think I am. I don’t know what to do!”—she instead flees in tears, more alone than ever.

  Easy as it is to sympathize with Adriana, she’s not some pure soul being ruined solely by outside forces. She knows what Christopher does, and is excited whenever he brings home swag. And when she’s displeased that her best friend Tina (Vanessa Ferlito) seems to be flirting too much with Christopher, and vice versa, she exploits her FBI connection to rat Tina out for a scam she and her father are running through her job. Tina was on no one’s radar at the Bureau, and now she’s in her own jackpot because Adriana was feeling jealous and powerless and decided to exercise the only control she has left.

  This is a world that corrupts almost anyone who enters it. Adriana’s more innocent than many, but even she can’t resist. Is it any wonder Tony B would rather try to go straight, no matter how much it upsets his powerful cousin?

  “WHERE’S JOHNNY?”

  SEASON 5/EPISODE 3

  WRITTEN BY MICHAEL CALEO

  DIRECTED BY JOHN PATTERSON

  Small Strokes

  “I mean, don’t you love me?” —Tony

  The past can be a wonderful thing to contemplate. You were younger, your skin was smooth, your kids were small and adorable, you were at the height of your physical or creative powers, whatever. We see this all the time on The Sopranos, going back to the pilot where Tony lamented coming in at the end of something that had once been so much better, and lectured Meadow about his grandfather helping to build the church.

  The past can also be a trap. Dwelling on history can not only interfere with enjoying the present, it can easily dredge up bad feelings best left alone. And few things are ever quite as great as your memories tell you they were; had Johnny Boy seen a therapist, surely he would have complained about not being around in Lucky Luciano’s heyday.

  Few characters on The Sopranos are more trapped in the past than Uncle Junior, who’s forever bloviating about some caper he and his brother pulled, or what Angie Dickinson looked like, or how Tony used to treat him with more respect. Thus far, this was a conscious choice by a lonely old man who understood his best days were behind him. Late in season four, though, his phony dementia turned out to be sadly real, and in the haunting15 “Where’s Johnny?” his condition takes an aggressive leap that strands his mind in the past.

  At first, this manifests itself in small ways, like Junior’s repeating the old insult about Tony never having the makings of a varsity athlete, which comes up during a work meeting with Angelo Garepe and New York shylock Lorraine Calluzzo16 about the growing feud between factions loyal to Johnny Sack or Little Carmine, then at a family dinner at Bobby and Janice’s attended by all three Soprano siblings.17

  The latter comment is enough to make Tony—always sensitive about insults from anyone, but particularly from loved ones like Junior—wash his hands of his uncle and focus on work, where he’s not only trying to intercede in the New York war (he proposes a power-sharing arrangement between Johnny and Little Carmine, with Angelo coming out of retirement to mediate), but also arbitrates a smaller feud between an indignant Feech and Paulie over the business of landscaper Sal Vitro (Louis Mustillo).18

  Junior’s dementia grows exponentially worse after a series of miniature strokes, only diagnosed after he’s gone on a walkabout to the old neighborhood in Newark, where he can’t understand why all the people and places he knew so well in the ’60s are gone. However much misery Junior has brought others in prior seasons, it’s still sad to see him so lost and confused. It’s The Sopranos once again applying a slice of life, one that many people understand all too well, to a Mob context. The longer Junior’s odyssey lasts, as he realizes he won’t be finding Johnny Boy, the more childlike and afraid Dominic Chianese becomes. At one point, he winds up on a bench with a homeless woman who offers him sex in the backseat of the car he can no longer find: the memory of where he parked is as lost as the one about his brother’s death.

  Tony, still bitter over the varsity athlete comments, is unmoved by word that his uncle has gone missing. When Bobby and Janice tell him about the dementia, it turns into another argument between Tony and his sister about past slights and disappointments, including Janice observing how depressing it is that Tony is back in Livia’s house, and Tony mocking Janice’s sexual history in front of her new husband (“Roadies?!” a dismayed Bobby asks in response to one of the stories), until the siblings become violent.19

  When Junior’s neurologist—who also happened to treat Livia after her fake stroke—tells Tony how serious the condition is, and how the recent insults were surely a result of it, Tony relents and goes to the
house in Belleville to find Junior’s mind largely returned to the present. This allows Tony to address what he sees as the worst part of this whole unfortunate incident: it’s not just that Junior’s brain is forcing him to repeat the past, but that it’s forcing him to repeat the ugliest parts of it—never all those times he and Tony played catch.

  “Why’s it gotta be something mean?” Tony asks, as vulnerable as we’ve ever seen him around his uncle. “Why can’t you repeat something good? I mean, don’t you love me?”

  This is an unfair question, given that Junior has no control over how his condition manifests itself. But it’s also true that the Junior we’ve witnessed all these years, and the one we’ve heard so much about in the past, rarely had a kind word for his nephew. Although he and Livia weren’t blood relatives, they shared a congenital need to express their disappointment in all things Tony Soprano. Regardless of what year Corrado Soprano thinks it is, odds are it’ll be one where he’s saying something cruel to his brother’s son.

  The worst part is that, even in his fragile mental state, it’s still not too late for Junior to try to correct all that’s gone wrong in the past. All he has to do is respond to Tony’s final question in the affirmative. But he can’t. Whether that’s from shame, or old-school reticence, or the dementia temporarily robbing his ability to speak, it ultimately doesn’t matter.

  “ALL HAPPY FAMILIES”

  SEASON 5/EPISODE 4

  WRITTEN BY TONI KALEM

  DIRECTED BY RODRIGO GARCIA

  Steamrollers

  “You don’t know what it’s like to have your son hate your guts.” —Carmela

  Imitation is the sincerest form of television, and The Sopranos is among the most imitated shows of all time, from fellow classics (Breaking Bad) to absolute stinkers (Low Winter Sun) to somewhere in between (Brotherhood). Most of these shows feature a charismatic antihero operating outside the law, and many also feature a wife whom the audience grows to despise, even though she’s objectively far more sympathetic.

  Despite setting up that template in the relationship between Tony and Carmela, The Sopranos largely avoided the misogynistic backlash that would greet many of Carm’s spiritual descendants. Sure, there were fans who had less patience for family stories than Family ones—the “Less yakkin’, more whackin’” crowd—and Carmela was the focus of a lot of their least-favorite subplots. But everyone other than the most hardcore Stockholm syndrome sufferers at least recognized that she was usually the wronged party in the Soprano marriage, someone capable of feeling guilt over the devil’s bargain that she’d made of her life in a way her husband never could.

  So what spared Carmela from the fate of Breaking Bad’s Skyler White or Mad Men’s Betty Draper? Why did even fans who could rationalize away the worst misdeeds of Tony or Christopher or Paulie Walnuts sympathize with Carmela?

  It starts with the sheer force of Edie Falco’s performance. Great as so many of the series’ actors are, only Falco could fully match James Gandolfini for raw emotion, particularly in “Whitecaps.” Carmela is a hypocrite and a user, and in many ways a much worse person than some TV wives who followed her, but when she’s feeling vulnerable or self-aware, her work is so strong and so palpable, it feels like she’s reaching through the TV to slap the viewer into tears.

  Next, Carmela never objects to what Tony does for a living, only to the other women he sleeps with and the ways he treats her beyond the adultery. She doesn’t know the full extent of what Tony is capable of, but she knows enough.20 She’s occasionally played accessory, helping him hide money, guns, or other contraband, and is largely unmoved by stories of people who have suffered at his hands (unless it’s in a way that she feels she could suffer one day, like Angie Bonpensiero21 working at the supermarket). It reflects poorly on her as a person, but if you tune in to The Sopranos partly to enjoy watching Tony and his crew run scams, you never have to worry about Carmela being the killjoy getting in the way of their fun, and yours.

  Finally, the show makes it clear early and often that Tony is an awful husband, and that however much Carmela enjoys his spoils, no one deserves to be lied to and humiliated. Even in the pilot, one of her most memorable scenes is the one where Tony tells her he’s in therapy—while on a date at a restaurant we just saw him take Irina to, making clear not only that Tony considers his own wife second best, but that the rest of their world knows it, and is complicit in making her a perpetual fool. True, Carmela knows how her lifestyle is funded yet does nothing about that. But Tony’s cheating seems less like punishment for Carmela’s complicity than another manifestation of his callous selfishness. And no matter how invested a viewer might be in seeing Mob action and Tony Soprano triumphant, episodes like “All Happy Families” illustrate how well The Sopranos insulated Carmela from most of the backlash that accrued to the spouses of subsequent antiheroes.

  After a few episodes that treated the marital separation matter-of-factly, “All Happy Families”22 brings the new status quo—and the many ways that it is not an improvement for Mrs. Soprano—to the fore, by focusing on how Carmela has become the villain to her own son.

  Carmela has long been her kids’ punching bag. Tony’s behavior is always far worse, but no one expects any better from him, whereas even the smallest real or perceived maternal slight puts Meadow and/or AJ into attack mode. AJ still blames Carmela for kicking Tony out. He’s struggling in school, despite the best efforts of guidance counselor Robert Wegler (David Strathairn23), and acting utterly disrespectful toward his mom. Tony is only making matters worse by lavishing the kid with gifts no matter how awfully he treats his mother: first with the drum set, and here with a new, fully loaded SUV as a half-assed bit of academic motivation, given without even a heads-up to Carmela.

  It’s exasperating for her, and Falco shoulders every last bit of weariness, even as the separation makes her free to lash out at Tony more brutally than in the past. When Tony refuses to pay to replace the home theater sound system he removed out of spite in “Rat Pack,” she points out that she was using it to enjoy movies with her many friends, whereas he only has flunkies who suck up to him because they’re scared of him.

  It’s an insult Tony shrugs off at the time, but it proves invaluable in helping him realize it’s time to be done with Feech La Manna. Feech is once again nothing but an irritant for Tony, telling more of his old stories and stealing cars at the wedding of Dr. Fried’s daughter, despite Fried24 being a valuable friend of the Family. What triggers the decision to get rid of Feech is less the thefts than Tony recalling a moment earlier in the episode when he told a stupid joke at the Executive Game25 and everyone laughed like a hyena except for Feech. Once Tony can admit that, as Carmela warns, the adulation is undeserved, he can see that Feech’s scowl even in this context suggests a genuine threat to his reign, and he has Christopher set Feech up with a parole violation.

  This is an abrupt and disappointing end to the arc of a character seemingly designed for much greater importance, but it also illustrates the kind of growth Tony has experienced as a Mob boss that eludes him as a husband and father. The Tony of earlier seasons might not have realized he could eliminate the hot-tempered old thug by playing on his greed, machismo, and love of action, especially with so straightforward a scheme. As he asks Sil after his Executive Game epiphany, “Did I learn nothing from Richie Aprile?”26 In fact, he did, and his nonviolent checkmate of Feech is proof.

  Tony is also kept busy playing host to Tony B and his twin sons Jason and Justin (conceived during his long incarceration thanks to Tony helping to smuggle his sperm out of prison) and contemplating the increasing mess in New York, where Phil Leotardo and his brother Billy (Chris Caldovino) murder Lorraine Calluzzo27 on Johnny Sack’s behalf, prompting Little Carmine’s advisor Rusty Millio (Frankie Valli28) to push for retaliation.

  It’s another reason why the separation is so much harder on Carmela than Tony. He has work as an outlet, even when everyone around him is being difficult. She has only her family
, at the moment primarily a petulant teenage boy who treats her with nothing but contempt. Sick of playing the bad guy while AJ continues to worship at the altar of his cheating, cruel father, she ignores her better judgment and gives him permission to go to a concert in the city, provided he spends the night on Meadow’s couch. Instead, he stays at a hotel with friends, where they get high and perform juvenile pranks on each other, like shaving off an unconscious AJ’s eyebrows and gluing his face to the floor. Like Meadow was at first after being busted for the party at Livia’s house in season two, AJ is utterly unrepentant when confronted about it, even saying “Fuck you” to his mother’s face, then walking away while she’s in pain from falling while chasing after him. And again, like Meadow, he wraps Tony around his finger and makes him see his side of things, but the difference is that Carmela no longer has reason to play nice. Both Anthony Sopranos have been so awful to her for so long that she doesn’t have to pretend anymore, and instead orders AJ to go stay with Tony over at Livia’s house, despite objections from both father and son.

  Even this could perhaps be framed by pro-Tony viewers as nagging behavior, but the episode’s sympathies are strongly behind Carmela, who admits at dinner with Mr. Wegler that she’s terrified of AJ going into the Family business. Given what happened to Jackie Aprile Jr.—just as spoiled and entitled and oblivious as AJ (but with better hair)—we share her justifiable fear.

  Even the temporary victory over Tony and AJ feels hollow. Yes, she no longer has to put up with her son’s insults and insubordination, and is even free to pursue an interesting man in Mr. Wegler, who couldn’t be further from the world she knows. But she still goes home to a huge, empty McMansion, built for a large and happy family, now occupied only by Carmela and memories of better times. The hour opens with AJ practicing behind the wheel of the family station wagon in the driveway; it ends with a flashback to him as a toddler riding his Big Wheel down that same driveway, a worried younger Carmela calling after him. He didn’t listen to her then, either, but he was still innocent and sweet. Not anymore. Now he’s just another man who treats Carmela Soprano like garbage.