The Many Saints of Newark review: The Sopranos prequel movie is mostly for fans

Every prequel is truly a sequel, and that’s especially true of The many saints of Newark, a movie advertised as “A Sopranos Story. “The film, which will be released simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max, is set in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in the same world as The sopranos, the groundbreaking television drama that helped turn HBO into a strong cultural force. The movie takes place decades before. The sopranos, but it probably wouldn’t have existed without the TV series. And while its story is unique, it is primarily aimed at fans of the show, echoing the ideas and themes that writer-producer David Chase explored over the course of six seasons. It is both an epilogue to the show and a prologue.

Then yes Many saints works like a movie will probably depend on the level of investment of viewers in The sopranos. It’s a refined and entertaining movie, but much of its meaning stems from how much the audience cares about a handful of TV characters they may or may not meet.

For those who have never seen an episode of the show, The many saints of Newark it will probably seem overloaded and strangely out of focus, telling a story mainly about one of theSopranos Characters: Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola), a charismatic New Jersey mobster who tries to escape the shadow of his domineering father “Hollywood Dick” Moltisanti (Ray Liotta). Over the course of the film, Dickie is torn between the demands of his passionate love affair with an Italian immigrant named Giuseppina (Michela De Rossi) and his other responsibilities, primarily to his organized crime family and his royal family, which includes a newborn. child.

On The sopranos, Dickie is a distant legend, remembered as the long-deceased father of next-generation thug Christopher Moltisanti (played by Michael Imperioli, who also narrates this film) and a hero to his nephew Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), who is becomes Christopher’s father. boss and mentor. The many saints of Newark It shows Dickie helping Tony (James’s son Michael Gandolfini), but it’s more about Dickie striving to be a better person than the thieves who came before him. As part of that effort, he works closely with Harold McBrayer (Leslie Odom Jr.), a black gangster whom his more intolerant Italian-American colleagues deeply distrust.

Roughly the first half of the film is set in 1967 and focuses heavily on the relationship between these two men, spending a lot of time with Harold as he weighs the possibility of parting ways with the Italians and leading his own team. Chase (who co-wrote the script with Lawrence Konner) and director Alan Taylor contrast the conservative culture of old mob soldiers, who still wear suits and listen to Frank Sinatra, with the ever-changing culture around them, where acid rock and Political radicalism have already taken hold. Tensions flare in the 1967 Newark race riots, which eventually break the link between Harold and Dickie.

Chase has said that the origins of The many saints of Newark precede The sopranosand that he had long wanted to make a movie set in the context of the Newark riots. Eventually he folded that idea into a Sopranos project, once he got comfortable with the notion of revisiting those characters, and the notion that a Sopranos the prequel would be easier to sell than a completely original historical drama.

But in Many saintsIn the second half, set around 1972, issues of racial tension and social change begin to fade as Chase and company give more screen time to teenage Tony, his abrasive mother Livia (Vera Farmiga) and his brutal father Johnny ( Jon Bernthal). ). This is where the newcomers The sopranos It might start to get confused, as Harold becomes a minor character and the story shifts to the relationship between Dickie and Tony. In the end, this is more of a proper prequel, explaining how Tony Soprano became the anxiety-ridden and nostalgia-prone mobster that he is on television.

To that end, Chase provides a host of Sopranos fan service. Younger versions of most of the show’s main characters appear, played by actors who essentially mimic the originals. (Most successful: Corey Stoll as Junior Soprano, capturing the essence of Dominic Chianese’s performance in Junior, playing a man who manipulates people from the sidelines by constantly complaining.) The movie is also riddled with Sopranos Easter eggs, especially in the choice of New Jersey locations, many of which are incredibly important in the television series.

Actually, The many saints of Newark it’s more like two Sopranos flashback episodes tied together of what is a proper movie. But what matters most ultimately is that they are well flashback episodes.

Chase’s time out of this franchise hasn’t weakened his ability to write snappy dialogue for these mobsters and their families, nor has it sapped his understanding of fine details. This movie is full of wacky Sopranos-weird moments, like a criminal giving another a stolen television to pay off a $ 300 debt, or Dickie casually tells Tony that he didn’t know there were Jews in the Middle Ages, and Tony would reply, “Well … the Bible …”

And while Chase doesn’t do justice to the Newark race relations story he initially set out to tell, he, Konner, and Taylor do a remarkable job of cutting the heart out of one of the The sopranos‘main themes: the feeling that a golden age has passed. There are two main recurring motifs in The many saints of Newark: great Italian parties, where old friends gather around delicious food dishes, and funerals, where those same friends say goodbye to the people who paid for those dishes.

The initial contrast in the film is between Dickie, steeped in a mob tradition that he finds exhausting, and Harold, who thinks more freely. Later, the contrast is between Tony, who sees his uncle as a magical man who can get him whatever he wants, and Dickie, who pays a price for that power. Along the, The many saints of Newark he is very clear about what this life really costs.

In his 1995 film essay A personal journey with Martin Scorsese through American films, Scorsese talks about the concept of former Hollywood studio filmmakers doing a bit of “smuggling” in their work: artists like Jacques Tourneur, Fritz Lang, Anthony Mann, and Douglas Sirk, who delivered well-crafted and friendly genre films to the audience that also included some astute commentary on human nature, social order, and American materialism.

It may be a reach to call Chase a smuggler, since The sopranos It was always a richly thematic show, open about its most literary and cinematographic pretensions. But with The many saints of Newark, take something that I knew people wanted, plus Sopranos – and uses it as an excuse to wander through his own memories and worries. Results may not fully satisfy Sopranos fans or non-fans, albeit for different reasons. But even in its irregularity and incompleteness, the film feels alive.

The many saints of Newark it is now in theaters and airs on HBO Max.