The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  Social-striving mobsters live in constant fear that their veneer of respectability will be torn away and they’ll be exposed as parasites. Sometimes they’re doomed to be exposed; no matter how circumspect the gangster and his family are, there will be days when the larger society (represented by cops or prosecutors) feels emboldened to call a gangster a gangster, and when it happens in public, it stings no matter how big a boss you are. The Sopranos has acknowledged this particular anxiety in the past, but never as frankly as it does here. Except for the prosecutor who fought the day pass, the government was generous with Johnny, yet somehow the day still became a mass public shaming in black tie. Terence Winter’s script deploys these elements without fuss, and director Steve Buscemi deepens them with God’s-eye view shots that physically diminish the gangsters at key moments (the wedding guests ascending a spiral staircase; Vito getting situated in the motel; Tony puking blood in the bathroom).

  That men’s room scene is a reminder of the sacrifices Tony makes to maintain the status quo. This life is destructive in every way: morally, spiritually, and now physically. He made his choice, and now he’s paying in blood. After he vomits, he looks at himself in the mirror with a cocky-scary “I’m back” expression. Then a shadow of doubt crosses his face. Then he drops to all fours and vomits again. This is a different kind of cost-benefit analysis, conducted by the body, not the mind.

  “LIVE FREE OR DIE”

  SEASON 6/EPISODE 6

  WRITTEN BY DAVID CHASE AND TERENCE WINTER AND ROBIN GREEN & MITCHELL BURGESS

  DIRECTED BY TIM VAN PATTEN

  Deep in the Valley

  “This guy that got outed, look, the guys that work for me are asking for head. His head. What the fuck?” —Tony

  Did you hear the one about the Jersey mobster who walked into a Norman Rockwell painting of New England? Neither did we, because usually you can’t get there from here.

  “Live Free or Die” ends in the state whose motto provides the hour’s title, but it begins on home turf, with a wide shot of the still-recovering Tony shambling around the backyard in his bathrobe and having his reading interrupted by the grinding whine of a defective ventilation unit. He walks over to the unit, futzes with it, rips off the top and hurls it away in disgust, then resumes reading.22 Moments later, the grinding noise returns, and rather than attack the problem again, Tony ignores it.

  The final scene finds Vito in the fictional hamlet of Dartford, New Hampshire,23 which seems to be filled with bourgeois gay men, as he strolls down the main drag and then ducks into an antiques shop. When he asks the clerk about a particular vase, the clerk compliments Vito’s taste: “You’re a natural.” As the clerk walks away, Tim Van Patten’s camera dollies in slowly on Vito as he continues to regard the vase. What makes this shot so potent is Vito’s unselfconsciousness. For the first time in his history on the series, he seems completely at ease.24

  These are gateway images that invite us to reflect on everything we’ve seen this season. In a sense, Tony’s and Vito’s stories are the same story. They’re about men who want to change (or escape) the lives they have, and become different people—or the men they always should have been.25 The combination of the turn this character takes and the setting where it happens induces a magical feeling of suspension. It’s as if Vito, like Tony, has briefly died and gone somewhere else.

  Whither Tony? Or wither Tony? Hard to say. His near-death shook him up and caused him to adopt a live-and-let-live approach to Mob management. Here, Tony runs afoul of his crew by greeting news of Vito’s orientation with a shrug. “I got a second chance,” he says of Vito. “Why shouldn’t he?” And a more poignant response to his crew: “You gonna take care of his kids after he’s gone?” Notwithstanding his calculated public beatdown of Perry, he does seem softer and more reflective. As he lies in bed with Carmela, the vertical scar on his belly suggests a C-section; could we be privy to the gradual birth of a New Tony?

  The defective ventilation unit illuminates Tony’s present problem and his larger arc. Vito’s exposure tosses a wrench into the gangster machinery, and Tony can’t ignore that grinding sound. His ham-fisted jabs at enlightened thinking (“It’s 2006! There’s pillow-biters in the Special Forces!”) don’t work on this bunch, which views homosexuality as a graver sin than shooting a guy and grinding him up. Sooner or later Tony will have to give the order to kill Vito, watch helplessly while someone else freelances the deed, or take a stand and pay the price.

  More significantly, though, that opening reminds us of Tony’s failure to recognize the root cause of his psychic distress: he’s a murderous criminal. Even therapy hasn’t attacked the heart of the matter. Melfi’s therapy is not making Tony a better man, but a better gangster. His dead mother isn’t the problem; he is.

  Vito, meanwhile, is enjoying his own version of the rustic yuppie life that Eugene Pontecorvo was denied when he escaped his Mob-ligations at the end of a rope. As Vito wanders around Dartford, he seems more relaxed—more himself—than ever. The masterful slow-build sequence depicting his flight includes eerie shots of Vito trudging through torrential rain after his car breaks down (abandoning the vehicle we’d seen him drive during his various Mob errands). Barely protected by a thin poncho, the drenched infant-doughy thug is reborn at a bed-and-breakfast, courtesy of an innkeeper who refuses to take a fistful of thank-you cash. For all she knows, he’s just some traveler trying to get out of the rain. Vito awakes the next morning in an elegant four-poster bed, framed in a low-angled master shot that again reminds us of astronaut Dave Bowman’s evolutionary stint in the white room at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film whose main subject is evolution as both physical event and metaphor: what’s gained and what’s lost.26 A baby-bodied mobster is reborn here. What will he become? Or, what will become of him?

  It’s surely no accident that Vito’s stopover in Norman Rockwell country echoes Tony’s sojourn in Coma Land, right up to his climactic arrival at a welcoming home. (Vito, unlike Tony, dares to step inside.) It also doesn’t seem an accident that this episode sees Carmela chew out her pop for looting and dismantling the spec house. (Hugh counters that the house was a lost cause because she was supposed to wrangle the proper government permits to build with inferior material, and didn’t do it; in other words, she neglected a problem that threatened a long-term dream, and now she has to accept the consequences. It’s the Costa Mesa defective heating unit conversation transposed to earth.) This season is all about new beginnings (or reconstructions) and how they are thwarted by bad luck, poor judgment, conditioning, and genetics. It makes sense that Vito would feel safe in a place marinating in its own authenticity. His inability to reveal his hidden truth is what drove him out of Essex County. Dartford seems heavenly, and Vito is so happy there that he seems better off than anyone he left in Jersey.

  Too bad bliss has a shelf life. How long will Vito’s last? Eugene’s corpse sways in the mind like a clock’s pendulum, counting down the seconds. Newcomers to organized crime are promised a glamorous life where they won’t be bound by the rules. What no one tells them is that they’re trading one set of rules for another.27 When Phil breaks the bad news to Vito’s wife—having heard Finn’s account28 of Vito and the security guard—he sounds like a prosecutor: “The witness has no reason to lie.” The disgusted reactions of the wiseguys back home suggest Vito can never return. The episode is called “Live Free or Die,” but in Soprano country, it’s not a choice but a sequence: live free and die.

  “LUXURY LOUNGE”

  SEASON 6/EPISODE 7

  WRITTEN BY MATTHEW WEINER

  DIRECTED BY DANNY LEINER

  The Haves and Have-Nots

  “Life’s not fair, right, I know. But somehow, I believed my dad’s crap about honest work. He used to say to me, ‘You’ll see. It pays off in the end.’ What a joke.” —Artie

  One of the many plagues befalling Vesuvio throughout “Luxury Lounge” is the opening of a rival Italian restaurant, Da Giovanni, in a nearby suburb. When
we see the place, with Tony looking like a guilty cheating spouse because he has to attend the confirmation of Phil’s grandson, the buffet is as spectacular as promised: one amazing dish after the next, with ingredients to be analyzed and tastes to savor.

  The first six episodes of season six were so rich and constantly surprising, they felt very much like that buffet. The thought of following them with an Artie showcase episode—even one where he splits time with another of Christopher’s showbiz misadventures—and one that rehashes a similar episode’s story beats (“Everybody Hurts”: Artie gets too sweet on his hostess and learns his limitations as a tough guy)—sounds as appetizing as most of the wiseguys are finding Vesuvio’s stale menu at this point. Instead, “Luxury Lounge” turns out more like the rabbit dish Artie improvises near the end of the hour: not what the diner might have ordered, yet simple and effective.

  “Luxury Lounge” ties the story of Artie running afoul of Benny Fazio in New Jersey and Christopher and Little Carmine failing to impress Ben Kingsley in Beverly Hills with unifying emotional threads of envy and its twin, resentment. Or, as Christopher inadvertently sums up the theme while complimenting Lauren Bacall on her most famous role, “You were great in The Haves and Have-Nots [sic]”

  Artie has always struggled financially doing things the right way, while his restaurant’s most frequent customers profit from breaking the rules. Tony and Artie are childhood friends, and were even roommates briefly before Charmaine took Artie back,29 but Artie is essentially the Family’s hired help. He usually can swallow this, but when the mobsters get too invasive—which Benny does twice, first seducing Martina (Manuela Feris), the latest hostess Artie’s smitten with, then using her to steal Vesuvio patrons’ credit card numbers, costing Artie business—the chef with the prominent forearms has had all he can stands, and he can’t stands no more. He goes to Benny’s house and lays an impressive beating on Christopher’s diminutive lieutenant. It’s a rare triumph for Artie—which he celebrates with some exaggerated Ali-style shadowboxing—and one he seems likely to get away with, because he’s the boss’s oldest friend. (Tony to Benny: “You don’t shit where you eat. And you really don’t shit where I eat.”) But the same mouth that can’t stop chatting up uninterested customers also can’t stop from lording the situation over Benny when he brings his wife and parents to Vesuvio for an anniversary dinner, which leads an enraged Benny to plunge Artie’s arm into a pot of bubbling sauce.

  This violence is happening a continent away from Christopher and Little Carmine’s attempt to get Ben Kingsley to play the Mob boss in Cleaver.30 The Oscar-winning Gandhi star is, unsurprisingly, not impressed with their pitch, while Christopher winds up too impressed by, and envious of, a glimpse of the eponymous luxury lounge, where celebrities are gifted amazing swag in exchange for posing for the brands’ publicity: Ben Kingsley was spotted wearing an Oris timepiece while hanging by the pool at the Viceroy Hotel!

  Among Christopher’s favorite perks of the job is all the free stuff he gets, but the garbage bag full of designer shoes he once brought home to Adriana seems pitiful compared to these lavish items that Kingsley couldn’t be more jaded about. If Artie’s a man whom Benny can assault and mutilate in his place of business without fear of repercussions, then Christopher is barely worthy of Ben Kingsley’s notice at all. He is nothing to this man who represents so much of what he’s always dreamed of being, and the recognition of that sends him spiraling, first on a bender that requires the intercession of sidekick/sponsor Murmur (Lenny Venito31), then by getting in on the swag action by mugging Bacall32—so he can abscond with her $30,000 ShoWest gift basket. But even that pathetic victory is short-lived, since he winds up on a cross-country flight with Kingsley, and has to see how irritated the Sexy Beast actor is to have to breathe the same air with him again.33

  Christopher comes out of “Luxury Lounge” with the gift basket and not much else. Artie fares a little better. He has to once again make peace with being the law-abiding grunt in the wiseguy world, but he can do it because he has this thing he loves, and he’s good at it when he’s not boring customers with ingredient lists or hitting on uninterested women (“You stare at me like food!” gripes Martina). John Ventimiglia is exquisitely desperate throughout the hour, Willy Loman via Big Night—a film referenced in the back-to-square-one cooking montage scored, naturally, to music that would sound at home in the old country.

  Compared to their respective Bens this time out, Christopher and Artie are definitely the Have-Nots. But only one of them is able to accept what it is that he has.

  “JOHNNY CAKES”

  SEASON 6/EPISODE 8

  WRITTEN BY DIANE FROLOV & ANDREW SCHNEIDER

  DIRECTED BY TIM VAN PATTEN

  Imitations of Life

  “Sometimes, you tell a lie so long, you don’t know when to stop. You don’t know when it’s safe.” —Vito

  “Johnny Cakes” is the biggest departure of season six, and possibly the series. “Join the Club” and “Mayham” may have brought us to an alternate reality, or the afterlife, but the Kevin Finnerty interludes still fit the overall style and mood of many of the show’s dream sequences. Other episodes have traveled a much greater physical distance than New Hampshire, but still bring the show’s atmosphere with them. You can take Paulie Walnuts out of New Jersey, but you can’t take the New Jersey out of Paulie Walnuts, even when he’s in Italy.

  In “Johnny Cakes,” though, it’s not just that Vito isn’t really being Vito anymore, posing as “Vince,” a sportswriter working on a book on either Rocky Marciano or Rocky Graziano, depending on which lie he remembers to tell that day, and eventually falling into a romance with Jim (John Costelloe), the short-order cook whose breakfast specialty gives the episode its title. It’s that the entirety of the affair plays out stylistically unlike anything the show’s done before. The look and tone are somewhere between a Twilight Zone episode set in one of those classic Rod Serling small towns of the imagination, and a stubbly, two-fisted cousin of a Douglas Sirk movie,34 about a couple of guys who could not be further removed from the quippy, college-educated, upper-middle class image of gay men so often presented on American TV at that time, notwithstanding occasional outliers like Queer as Folk and Six Feet Under. The opening intercuts Tony readjusting to “regular” life (for a gangster) and Vito in Dartford having an adventure of self-discovery that’s about as dreamlike as can be while still feeling like it’s happening in the Sopranos-verse. From the moment that Johnny, a Tom of Finland cartoon made manifest, rolls up on his Harley Davidson at a house fire and emerges moments later with an adorable blond child, we’re in what we might imagine to be Vito’s fantasy of the life he can never have back in New Jersey. The rest of this subplot is stocked with overt signifiers and melodramatic dialogue, from the classic 1950s diner that looks like a place where Rock Hudson might’ve nursed a hangover, to the tweedy types loitering in the parlor of the bed-and-breakfast, to lines like Vito’s chapter-opening quote, which would fit on a poster advertising a pre-1960s melodrama about American souls in torment. Some of the details are unconvincing, and the performances feel a bit skittish even considering the storyline, but there are many unexpectedly right moments, such as the John Wayne–quality brawl outside the bar, sparked by the self-loathing Vito returning Joe’s kiss with a punch, and the way he makes amends with a gesture—laying one hand atop another—that’s probably the bravest thing he’s done in his life.

  Vito’s scenes also provide an affecting mirror of Tony and AJ each grappling with their own fears that they’re pretending, or fighting their true natures. But we’re always reminded that Vito is worst off by far, because his fellow mobsters are so homophobic that they consider his existence a threat to their manhood. The parallel editing often makes it seem as if three major subplots are speaking to one another. We see Vito walk down the sidewalk in Dartford, his true nature kept under wraps, then cut to Christopher openly eyeballing women on the sidewalk in front of Satriale’s; Tony gets up to leave the p
ork store right before Vito walks into the diner; AJ gets a backrub from a teenage hanger-on while her friend goes down on AJ’s buddy, followed by Vito filching a fellow hotel guest’s cell phone so he can call the wife and son who have no idea where he is, much less who he’s evolving into.

  Meanwhile, the Newark neighborhood where Tony grew up is undergoing its own transformation, and for better or worse, Tony decides not to fight it. The cash for selling the building that houses Caputo Live Poultry overcomes his fondness for being the Don Fanucci of the North Ward, and the realtor, Julianna Skiff (Julianna Margulies35), tempts him to revert sexually to the old self that Carmela (and perhaps Tony) believed that he’d outgrown. When Julianna offers to buy the building, Tony resists, partly out of attraction. Other than being Jewish instead of Italian, she checks all of his usual boxes—beautiful, intelligent, professional, brunette, damaged (her language suggests being in some sort of recovery)—and he wants an excuse to keep seeing her. He also genuinely likes the idea of a business like Caputo’s enduring in that neighborhood: It fits his nostalgia-drenched ethos.

  As usual, though, Tony prizes money above all else, and anticipates signing the papers at her luxury apartment in a converted glove factory. (Even her living space represents everything Tony claims to hate.) But despite having what he describes as “a baguette in my pants now 24/7” as his body recovers from the shooting, he can’t go through with it, leaving Julianna frustrated and confused when he bolts. Tony’s emotional calculus is conveyed nonverbally here through earlier shots of Tony fixating on Carmela’s hands buttoning his dress shirt over the scarred belly whose innards she bravely stared into, and of her eyes gazing up at him adoringly, and rhyming images of Julianna trying to unbutton that same shirt later, a gesture that triggers guilty recoil in Tony. It’s the first sign of genuine emotional change for him post-shooting, and one he’s not particularly happy about, as evidenced by the closing scene where he yells at Carmela for failing to stock the fridge with smoked turkey—perhaps an attempt to retroactively give himself some justification, however absurd, for having almost stepped out on her.