The Many Saints of Newark strikes me, as the show did, as junior-varsity Scorsese.
The Many Saints of Newark strikes me, as the show did, as junior-varsity Scorsese.
T he Sopranos never grabbed me, and I seldom watched it. I had the sense that others found it interesting for some of the same reasons they watched Jersey Shore. People told themselves, “This is prestige TV,” while they gawked at the strip-joint scenes and giggled at the mobsters’ Borscht Belt malapropisms.
The Many Saints of Newark strikes me, as the show did, as junior-varsity Scorsese. The suspense scenes aren’t as suspenseful as the mob master’s, the comic scenes aren’t as funny, the strange rituals and signifiers aren’t as rich and deep and fascinating and macabre. There’s a torture sequence that reminds me of how much more devastating the one in Casino was, and, when the film tries to deliver some rock ‘n’ roll gusto, it reaches for a second-tier Rolling Stones song (“Sway”). Moreover, the plot of the movie is meandering and haphazard. For a long period of time, everyone seems to forget that a gang war has gotten underway and can only end with the murder of one of two key figures. People go on about their lives when they should be going to the mattresses.
The long shadow of the young Vito scenes in The Godfather, Part II hangs over The Many Saints of Newark, which is falsely being billed as the coming-of-age story of Tony Soprano. Young Tony — who hangs around the background of the first half as a tweener played by William Ludwig, then starts to both resist and become corrupted by mob ways in the second half, as a teen played by Michael Gandolfini — is about the sixth-most-important character on hand and isn’t particularly well drawn. The script, co-written by 76-year-old David Chase, who also serves as producer, is so weak that we learn about Tony’s intelligence and leadership ability when a school principal tells us he scored high on I.Q. and leadership tests. This scene should be taught in screenwriting classes as an example of telling instead of showing. It isn’t organic or dramatic for a character, who plays no role in the plot and is never seen before or after, to simply walk in and spoon-feed information to the audience.
Mainly, the film, directed by HBO veteran Alan Taylor, is about Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola), the father of Tony’s so-called nephew Christopher. At the outset, Christopher notes in a cringey voiceover from beyond the grave that his life will end at the angry hands of Tony. (Cue scene where baby Christopher cries upon meeting Tony, and an old lady ruins the joke by piling on with an explanation that babies have knowledge that extends beyond their lifespans). He then segues into his family’s backstory.
In 1967, Dickie is the sharp-dressed son of a New Jersey mob boss (Ray Liotta) who brings home a lubricious young wife (Michela De Rossi) from Italy. Since the nubile bride is younger than young Dickie, he steams with a comical level of envy and lust. Liotta also plays his character’s twin brother, which is the kind of cheesy gimmick characteristic of TV shows from 1967. The background seethes and burns with police brutality, arson, and race riots, seen mainly through the eyes of a hungry young black man (Leslie Odom Jr.) who serves as a runner in the mafia’s numbers games before the states start to muscle in on this lucrative racket and rename it the lottery. The focus on injustice toward blacks feels a bit forced given that Chase never showed much interest in the subject before. Meanwhile, Tony’s mobster dad (Jon Bernthal) goes to prison, leaving Tony’s Uncle Junior (Corey Stoll) to take over certain aspects of the business.
Lots of people get killed, but none in any especially memorable ways. One major slaying is accidental; another is ordered for a ridiculously petty reason. The mechanics of how everything goes down don’t make a lot of sense; when one guy commits a gross breach of gang etiquette that is obviously punishable by death, the gangsters don’t go after him. Instead, they interrogate an underling to ask who his associate works for. Why take such an indirect path? Also, who starts a drive-by shootout halfway down the block from the target by killing an inconsequential character, thus giving remaining targets time to mount a defense? Isn’t the whole point of an ambush to take out your chief enemy before there is any possibility of reaction? And why do two characters who must know that having an affair could get either or both of them killed hop into bed together casually, even though there is no particular spark between them? Just about the only scenes that land are the rueful ones in which Liotta’s second character, an imprisoned murderer who has achieved a measure of clarity and wisdom behind bars, offers some sound advice to his nephew Dickie that will, of course, go unheeded.
As for the teen Tony, the heart of the film should be his tragic journey from innocent kid to the dark side, but the scenes that deal with this are slight and underwritten. The choice of actor is a big reason why the film doesn’t work. As played by the late James Gandolfini’s son Michael, young Tony seems doughy, passive, and dull rather than potentially formidable and wily. He doesn’t imbue the character with the requisite ferocity even in a scene in which he shows a flash of his future bad temper in beating up a fellow teen. It’s obvious why young Gandolfini got the part, and it’s not because of his screen presence, which is almost nil. Any number of intense young actors would have loved to have played this role. Instead, Chase chose a regrettable act of stunt casting. You pick actors based on talent, not genealogy.
