THE MANY SAINTS OF NEWARK, David Chase, and the Art of Giving Certain F*cks (Patreon)

1. The Anti-Shoe Maker

One of the greatest things about David Chase is that he clearly doesn’t give a fuck. Not about pomp, circumstance, or many of pleasantries that go along with show business. Not about glad-handing producers or playing the Hollywood games. It’s not that he’s trying to be confrontational about. It’s more just an air of terse focus. One that’s perhaps best summed up by this recent Alan Sepinwall interview, where he was asked what he hoped the audience’s response to the film would be: “Well, I’m hoping that a lot of people go to see it. I couldn’t say anything more than that. If they don’t, they don’t. I have had arguments with the studio about things that they want, because it’ll put butts in seats, as they say, that I just don’t want to do and won’t do. It’s unfortunate for Hollywood and for major studios that their business happens to contain an art form. I have no sympathy, and if they wanted that not to be the case, they should’ve gone into the shoe business.” What I love most about this quote is how it actually reveals the thing that Chase does care about: the art form itself.

And he cares very, very much.

It’s evident in just about everything he’s ever made. But part of what’s so interesting about that artistically-driven mindset is that The Sopranos was also so outrageously popular. Like The Matrix, it was a cultural obsession that helped feed the DVD boom and boxed set lifestyle. And it was so revolutionary that it basically started “the golden age of television” as we know it. All the quality programming of today comes as a direct result from its otherworldly success. Because it was the first to do a certain kind of cinematic serialization, with both adult content (read: boobs and pew pew) and adult content (read: really thoughtful storytelling about mature ideas). The Sopranos proved you could do it all. And perhaps because it was first, it had everyone glued to their TVs as if it was the only game in town. But nowadays? Well, this kind of content is far more commonplace. And if The Sopranos were to have come out today, who knows, perhaps more audiences would have bounced off its evasive and artistic leanings. And yet, it seems more young people are discovering it on HBO Max and loving it just the same. And I’d argue that’s because it still does something few other shows really do: which is genuinely avoid the indulgent aims of storytelling that so many other shows display, all while unapologetically putting “the art form” first.

Make no mistake. The Sopranos is not some deeply abstract, cerebral affair (though sometimes it could be). It was often hilarious, scathing, and brutal. IT eschewed ethos and dove right into pathos, as if dripping with the kind of humanity that isn’t so much about empathy building, as it is peering into the cracks of both mundane and ugly human behaviors. It had this pitch-perfect combination of insightful character work that mixed with a true-to-life understanding of psychology. But more than that? It organized all it’s stories into these little vignette-like episodes that often centered only around a common theme. And not in a political way, but often something far more nuanced or even existential. It’s outstanding popularity was a testament to those uncommon storytelling abilities, but it still couldn’t help but feel like a bit of an outlier just the same. If only because it was also one of the least plot-driven shows of all time. Hell, a lot of times it was reaching for anti-drama; always taking its carefully built conflicts into surprising directions. But the thing that most fascinated me about the experience of watching it was how people kept trying to apply logic of plot and conventional narrative every step of the way anyway. I mean, the show NEVER seemed to deliver on the dramatic expectation and yet constantly writing the expectation and would get mad when it didn’t deliver. What’s the saying? “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me for 86 episodes, shame on me?” I don’t know how it kept happening. It’s as if so many people, despite being transfixed by it, never fully came to grips with the show they were watching… and more importantly: what it really wanted from them as an audience.

It seems the trend has continued with The Many Saints of Newark.

Just like the show’s finale, I’ve been seeing angry responses, underwhelming responses, confused responses, and of course, a few glowing reviews, too. But even the LA Times has a piece about “what went wrong?” and looking at its box office / failure to connect and I’m sitting here in what feels like the same familiar place. Because I think the film is a downright masterful display of theme that puts it right in line with the best episodes of the show. To be clear, I honestly don’t really care to argue with anyone else’s take. Given the untraditional nature of the material, it’s all more than fair. And part of the joy is watching the endless directions people can take the work. We’ve all been doing this dance since 1999, after all. But in that same spirit, I want to talk about what makes The Many Saints of Newark so amazing.

But it starts with talking about a different movie…

2. Too Much Like What It Seems

I think there are a few important details needed to better understand the brain of David Chase. The first is that, as an actor, his only credits are a few Sopranos cameos and an appearance on BoJack Horseman, where he made fun of himself by playing the creator of “Mr. Peanutbutter’s House.” I can think of no better acting filmography. The second thing is to remember that this is a guy who cut his teeth on The Rockford Files and thus he really gets traditional A, B, C plotting, perhaps better than most. Which means none of his plotting choices are the accident of a guy who doesn’t know better. If anything, his ability to craft a tight plot is precisely what allows him to make pointed choices of when not to. Which leads us to the third important detail: his stealthy-great 2012 film Not Fade Away. Yes, Chase’s big followup to The Sopranos was a little coming of age story with no stars about wanna be rock stars. And it’s title is a reference to the bop-bop heavy Buddy Holly song of the same name.

A lot of people didn’t know what to do with Not Fade Away when it came out, because a lot of its excellence comes on the understated sly. It actually helps to look at it as being of a pair with Sing Street, just without the big open-hearted earnestness that that film uses to make you feel more alive. Chase is after similar ideas, but there’s a much bigger sense of critical distance here in exploring the thousands of bands that never “make it” in the world. Both feature a bunch of meandering kids who adopt musical postures, but where Sing Street pokes fun in a way that amps its endearing qualities, Not Fade Away targets the almost insufferable pretension of kids who are a few years older (which is an important difference). There’s a point of course, because it’s Chase looking back at his younger days of the boomer rock revolution with both an air of nostalgia for the music itself and a kind of anti-nostalgia for he and his friends' mindset. Because it’s a largely autobiographical story. The main character, Douglas, also grows up in Mt. Vernon, New York. He has a father who owns a hardware store. A mother always on the verge of apocalypse and threatening self harm. And he’s a young man dealing with undiagnosed depression while trying to make it as a professional musician. Again, it’s almost shockingly autobiographical.

But like all of Chase’s work, there isn’t a single indulgent bone in its body. It instead takes dead aim at the hypocrisies of his youth. Particularly the ways that he and his friends constantly find excuses to self-sabotage and let their lives get in the way. Which means the film truly meanders as a direct intention. There’s even a scene midway through where he and his date watch Blow Up and he asks “what kind of movie is this? Nothing happens!” Itself a hilarious criticism of his younger self knocking a film that is a huge influence on the way he tells stories now (and even how he’s telling this particular story). Because if he’s gonna tell an honest story about aimless kids, it’s gotta be aimless. And Chase really, really likes taking the piss out of all his characters (and himself) as they make these grand, wayward plans and get caught in their own pettiness and try to manage their image rather than cater to the work. It’s achingly self-critical.

And yet, it has all these achingly sentimental moments that hang around the margins. It holds on the moments he’s rude to his father and mother (who are absolutely figures with problems), but you see all these little missed opportunities where they were trying to connect to him and he wouldn’t have it for all these prideful reasons. Hell, the film’s already so emotionally loaded in having Gandolfini play his father in one of his last performances (and yes, he’s incredible). But at the heart you see the biggest divide simply being the pain of a life having been suffered through. The young son tries to discuss the appeal of The Twilight Zone, but the aching father can only chide in “real life is too much like what it seems.” For all their problems, the scene at dinner and the final moment in the car remain burned into my memory when it comes to the underplayed beauty of their relationship and the one thematic thing that connects them. It’s a story of how life slides by. You make this choice or that choice. You end up in places almost by accident. I won’t spoil it (not that spoiling it would even really make sense), but the film’s esoteric ending all serves as a reminder that entropy could take us at any point. And there are the things that keep us rocking and rolling or the things that put us in the graveyard.

Or more specifically, what put us there…

3. Who Made Who?

I weirdly feel bad for the marketing people behind The Many Saints of Newark because they have to try and actually sell this fucker. Which probably starts with the subtitle “A Sopranos Story” thus setting it squarely in The SCU. But when selling what this project is, it seems they’ve opted for this slogan: “Who Made Tony Soprano” as if this was some indulgent hero origin story. It’s not that. Yet, it is also very much that, just in all the anti-dramatic ways that made this show what it was, too. Because it turns out the “Tony Soprano” origin story is something far more evasive than whatever one may expect. A story much more about the emotional architecture of history. The way snap decisions and defensive behaviors echo down. And where things as simple as missed chances can become cutting wounds. It’s the way little bits of life add up and nip and tuck and push a person one way or the other. But The Sopranos has always been this way. After all, it’s the kind of show where a climax brews and Tony hilariously shouts “cunnilingus and psychiatry brought us to this!” and it’s absolutely true. But to really get into the function of The Many Saints of Newark here, we really have to get into all of it.

Which means… [spoilers for rest of part three, until the asterisks]

The first thing I kind of want to address is the idea this film is somehow trying to placate the audience with crowd-pleasing references and character-stuffing. Yes, everyone’s there. Yes, it echoes famous lines like Tony not having “the makings of a varsity athlete,” but the tone and intention of the joke matters, too. Again, please remember the kind of storyteller we’re dealing with in David Chase. Specifically, the understanding that he never took the show that seriously. Which is to say he never took the “seriousness” of the show that seriously. He often pushed the silliness and comically thin-skinned nature of his character. And most of all, he did because he hated indulgence. So I can promise he’s not really chasing after any kind of pandering reaction from you. In fact, it’s all part of him trying to keep a healthy distance.

For example, when people point out the young performers playing Paulie and Silvio in particular (John Magaro, an incredible actor and the lead of Not Fade Away) as seeming like caricatures. And it’s, like, y’all I’m literally rewatching the series for the sixth time as we speak and Silvio was ALWAYS bordering on a cartoon character. Because Steven Van Zandt always played him that broad, but that was totally okay! It was hilarious. Because it’s the kind of show that had long poop scenes and AJ asking  “who is cutting the big ones?” A show where Paulie watched Three’s Company and thought he was haunted by ghosts like he was in a Scooby Doo cartoon. A show where he had a breakdown and ended up eating mustard packets in the woods. It’s not just because Chase finds this kind of stuff genuinely funny (and it is funny). It’s part of the tonal levity of what makes the show work on a fundamental level. Because it’s part of what builds that separation from grim dark seriousness. Part of what stops you from saying “I wanna be cool like these guys!” And in that, it provides a necessary sense of distance so you can watch them do funny, horrible, charming, selfish, and mostly weak-minded things. What? You say it takes you out of it? But why would you want to be in it? This is so central to the aims of the show, particularly the later seasons. It’s so important not to take those parts seriously.

Because it’s all about the other things that Chase wants you to take seriously.

Chiefly, the themes. Starting broadly with The Many Saints of Newark, there’s lots of literal examples of people being called Saints and even a local gang who are known as “The Black Saints” (which only really provide a backdrop for one character’s starting point). But it’s more the story of the “Moltosantis” which is a name that literally means “many saints.” The film tells the story of the tragedies and deaths of that family, along with their intersection with another family, The Sopranos. And starting where it does, it draws a straight line all the way to events of the show which involve Christopher, specifically what really brings us from one emotional point to the other. Because it’s about the crippling notion of aiming for “sainthood” and the driving force of hypocrisy behind it.

To that, notice how much the film is about acts of displacement. On a surface level, Dickie Moltosanti is the handsome, well-liked, and level-headed figure within the middle management of the outfit. He’s the guy people listen to and gravitate toward. But under the surface, he’s struggling with so many hypocrisies that keep bubbling out. Take his grand sin. Dickie, once abused by his dad, sees him doing the same to his new young Italian wife Giuseppina (someone he clearly has a bit of a thing for). But when confronting him, he kills his father in a sudden burst of anger. Then in pure Oedipal fashion, he turns his step mother into his Goomar. But as nuts as he is about her, he is also afraid to support her dreams and just keeps putting her on a shelf. Everything is this big half bargain where he can’t fully embrace a role. Similarly, Dickie can’t properly see his wife as a Madonna figure because she won’t give him a son.

Where his brazen father just sociopathically lashed out with these kinds of things head on and tried to “own them” without caring what others thought, Dickie is too aware of both the violence of doing this and the lack of social graces, so he drives them inward. So he becomes littered with guilt and all these struggles to consecrate these sides of him. I mean, he literally starts teaching blind kids baseball (itself maybe even a fanciful aspiration). He goes to visit his dad’s twin, Uncle Sal, out of a displacing sense of guilt - even though Sal’s a guy who clearly doesn’t give a shit and just wants jazz records (also the differences in the two performances highlights how damn good Ray Liotta is). But it’s this same Uncle Sal who points out Dickie’s struggles with hypocrisy head on. And when you look around, you can see that it is the driving force of the actions within the entire film.

Take the film’s focus on the Newark riots. We see it all started because a white man told a black cab driver to go the wrong way down a one way street. First Dickie laughs at the cops getting caught up in all of it, but then becomes furious when protesters rock his car. But as the protests rage, it all just becomes cover for the mobsters to do what they want and blame it on the riots. Hell, Dickie literally has his dad’s dead body riding shotgun and the cops do is shout: “let him through, he’s white!” The movie, like the show, was always deeply aware of the backbreaking hypocrisy and racism at the heart of this. And if you’re worried Chase is somehow trying to come at a place of tacit approval, you have to go back to that semi-self portrayal in Not Fade Away, fashioned the himself the counter-cultural artist who warred with his father’s reactionary bullshit, while also highlighting his own hypocrisies of comfortable whiteness in turn (along with acknowledging the endless complications of these kinds of portrayals). Though I’m not sure I can argue the relative productivity of this approach, I can just say his disdain for this behavior is clear.

But so much of the exploration of this racial theme takes place in the central relationship between Dickie and Harold. You see the way Dickie, ever the pragmatist, is the one Italian guy utterly unafraid to work with him, and is even downright friendly. We see the way pulls Harold in with money and seduction, even pushing him into harder acts of violence (“aren’t you humiliated by what you just said?”). But for Dickie, it’s just another hypocrisy. He only cares about Harold as much as he can use him, all while keeping up obvious barriers. When Dickie sees Giuseppina briefly looking at Harold, he says  “you don’t stare at those people. They don’t like it.” Which is of course a clear, hypocritical inversion of the fact that he doesn’t like it. As those walls become more clear, Harold gets tired of doing Dickie’s dirty work and becomes enlightened by the notions of cultural revolution and Black Panther-esque ideology.

Which means he seeks to strike out on his own, run his own numbers, and stop the Italians from preying on his own community (and maybe even prey on the white community in turn by selling heroin). It goes even further when Giuseppina, often left so lonely by Dickie, sleeps with Harold. An act that cascades into the ultimate “boundary cross” for a racist Italian culture so outrageously sensitive about “Sicilian” origins (a dynamic planted earlier in the story). So Dickie, the one who once supposedly fought for her honor and safety, can’t abide any of this and drowns her in a rage, all building to what is clearly going to be a climax between him and Harold. But in classic Chase fashion, the resolution gets settled with a more insular, personal story (which we’ll come to in a second). But it’s one that ultimately leaves Harold triumphant, moving to a new house, fist full of cash, to a neighborhood of racist white people staring in terror. Harold smiles wide and in a kind of brazen way, the film is essentially painting Harold’s mobility and White Flight as a victory (I also want to highlight how good Leslie Odom Jr. is in this). But their anti-climax also brings us back to the film’s marketing promise that it was about, “Who Made Tony Soprano.”

Because all through Dickie’s journey, there’s the young Tony looking up to him.

The decision to tell the story through this lens is critical. Because it’s not so much “Tony’s origin story,” as it is this incredibly delicate look at the way the world dealt with a young Tony. It starts with his negligent father, who is both permissive of his behavior and kind of doesn’t care either way. It’s a stark contrast to the father Tony often talked about in the show. Even upon returning after four years from jail his father gets a surprise party and makes an aside that “all I want is to get laid by my Goomar and go to sleep.” It creates a space that’s left for figures like Dickie to step in (who as he stated, wanted a son). But it also creates so much space with his emotionally abusive mother to take a foothold in those formative years.

To that, Vera Farmiga chews all the best scenery, but so much of this story is about that one moment where the school counselor confides to Olivia the story Tony told her. The moment she read to him in bed at night, that one maternal moment when she actually cared for him in his father’s absence. And how much it meant to Tony in turn. Her response is so telling, it clearly gets at her emotions, yet she can’t even process that kind of connection. We then see her recognize that Tony wants that and she tries trying to capture that joy by making him hamburger. And he’s pleased as punch, but then she can’t help but end up being defensive, especially when trying to have a healthy conversation about her “taking medicine” AKA getting help for her developing mental illness. Her denial is just so deep and defensive. All that exists is the stigmatizing surfaces and the ways she can get emotional leverage over people. It all follows her all the way to Dickie’s funeral and the reveal that he had the medicine in his pocket (which was clearly for her) and she snarks, “you never know about people.” The thing about this plot-line is the quiet sense of tragedy under all of it. The idea that Olivia could have gotten help and medicated and just prevented SO MUCH PAIN in the years that followed. But like most of this story, it didn’t go that way.

Because all the while, there has been Dickie waiting in the wings. Like his own demons, Dickie embodies the push / pull in Tony’s life. He’s at once being the loving, affectionate Dad figure / the cool uncle / the slick mobster / and yet the one trying to keep him on the straight and narrow. It’s just more of the hypocrisy laid bare, because Dickie is constantly evoking the “do as I say not as I do” mantra and ignoring the ways it would obviously fall so flat. It all gets so clearly established in the film’s central “pinky swear” motif and also embodied by the final moments of Dickie literally trying to keep Tony out of his place of business and hiding. It’s pushing him in so many directions back and forth. And everything about this relationship cascades into two climactic moments.

The first is the reveal of how Dickie Moltosanti really died, which honestly put my jaw on the floor. The idea that Uncle Junior murdered Christopher’s father for laughing at him when he fell is 1) the most Sopranos shit ever, precise because it’s always been about the naked insecurities of these craven men, especially within their little cliques that both cater and deny to their pettiness and 2) it actually casts a whole new light on the series. Because all I want to do is go back and look at every interaction with Christopher because you can see the way it always manifests in Junior’s disdain. Just as you can see it in the way those decisions have echoed and cycled throughout time. It’s an ouroboros of pain. The film’s final pinky swear callback embodies all of it - something that was meant as a “promise I wouldn’t,” but instead becomes the very promise to continue the cycle. Which is something we will see time and time again when it comes to Tony’s relationship with Christopher, along with the understanding of how it ended. It’s all hypocrisy incarnate.

And when I pull back to look at the portrait of what Chase has crafted here, not just with this movie and The Sopranos, but in telling a story about that old-world, east coast brand of violent catholicism and the endless hypocrisies that come with it, you see how much the film is tapping directly into that toxic patriarchal psychology. It reminds me of everything I grew up with, everything I tried to avoid, and everything I didn’t realize got inside me anyway (as it does). Like Chase constantly seems to evoke, it’s the kind of thing that requires endless self-examination and the constant need for us to vomit out the toxicity of all this shit with reckless abandon, especially as we get older. And what’s remarkable about Chase is that he probably stares at the petty smallness of this ouroboros better than anyone.

* * *

With all that said, I think it’s hard to deny that The Many Saints of Newark is one of the most thematically-rich projects of the year. But it’s also impossible to qualify it as “a movie” on a logical level. It feels impenetrable without a real working knowledge of the show. And yet, as a prequel it’s not important to the story - and yet somehow it deepens the emotional history of the show beyond belief. Either way, I get why people might bounce off it. Heck, I’ve always got why people bounced off this property. But what is slighter harder to get time and time again is when people have watched this show for years and expect the plot to resolve like so, or give into an indulgent aime, when time and time again it has given us the more evasive, yet pointed thematic story. Why would people get angry at the movie for not being like the show that it never was? Why did this always seem to happen every new episode as we watched live? But rather than dwell on all that, Chase doesn’t seem to give a fuck. Not in the snide way where’s just trying to pull a fast one on the audience or be some sniveling rapscallion. Nah, he’s too matter of fact for any of that. And Chase actually gives a whole lot of certain fucks about what he’s trying to say and why. Whether it be the history of inherited familial pain, the architecture of cultural racism, or the nuggets of vulnerability that rest within our outward project selves. In short?

He gives a fuck about everything that might be the most important.

<3HULK