The final episode of “The Sopranos” aired in mid-2007, but creator David Chase is apparently not finished with Tony Soprano. We live in an era now hungry for Ted Lassos, not anti-heroes like Walter White or Tony. But the advertisements for The Many Saints of Newark, Chase’s “Sopranos” prequel, posit, “Who made Tony Soprano?” Anyone loyal to the show, which ended with a famously ambiguous finale, would likely be curious to know the answer to that question. However, that tagline is a bit of false advertising. We don’t get to see the legendary card game that a young Tony held up that was often discussed on the program. In fact, we don’t get to see much of Tony Soprano at all.
The lack of Tony isn’t really what makes The Many Saints of Newark sleep with the fishes. Instead, Chase tries to play things straight, creating a feature that feels more like a light version of The Irishman than the deliriously wackadoodle genre hodgepodge that we once saw on HBO. For some inexplicable reason, the story is narrated from beyond the grave by Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli) and instead of tracing the origins of Tony Soprano, The Many Saints of Newark focuses on Christopher’s late father, Dickie (Alessandro Nivola).
Now, Dickie is a lot less interesting than the adult Tony. He has issues with his father (Ray Liotta), who returns from a trip to Italy with a beautiful young wife in tow named Giuseppina (Michela De Rossi). Dickie is a lower-level hood who works a book in Newark. Besides dealing with his coarse father, Dickie also has a falling out with Harold (Leslie Odom Jr.), his former enforcer who sparks a war when he decides that he and his Black family deserve a piece of the book the Italians run in the city. It doesn’t take long before the married Dickie is bedding Giuseppina and trading bodies with Harold’s organization.
So where is Tony during all this? For the first half of the film, he is nine years old and played by William Ludwig in a purely observational role. The film hits all the right notes as a historical drama (and not in a good way), culminating in the 1967 Newark race riot that saw more than 25 killed and hundreds injured as Black rioters faced off against the police. Missing are many of the elements that made “The Sopranos” such a hit. There is little of the witty dialogue that took place between Tony (James Gandolfini) and Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco). A lot of the gallows humor is also stripped away, leaving behind a paint-by-numbers homage to Martin Scorsese flicks without any of the edge. Many of the characters from the show appear in younger incarnation, but serve little other function than fan service.
One of the biggest issues is that a feature simply cannot contain nor compare to the sweep of the television series. Chase and director Alan Taylor jam a lot into two hours but the material would have been better served over 10 or so hours. There is just too much to explore. We get strands of why Uncle Junior (Corey Stall) is a such bastard. Or how Tony essentially ends up marrying a version of his mother (played here by Vera Farmiga, channeling Edie Falco). But the biggest problem is that Dickie Moltisanti and his troubles just really aren’t that interesting. In the television show, Tony lionizes his deceased mentor, but Chase and Nivola don’t dig any deeper with Dickie than the “tormented bad guy” trope.
By the time the deceased Gandolfini’s son, Michael, steps into his father’s role as a teenager, The Many Saints of Newark has strayed too far to recoup any good will. Chase and Taylor really don’t do much to develop this prenatal Mob boss but rather allow what we have seen on the television show shade in where the character is going to go rather than what he’s doing and where he’s been. Somehow, we’re supposed to glean that Dickie is the catalyst for what Tony becomes. That is pretty difficult to suss out based on what Chase presents us. In the approximation of a post-credits scene, the film reveals a clumsy link to a potential sequel. The Many Saints of Newark would have likely worked stretched over a full season of television, but as a feature film, it’s dead on arrival.
Photo courtesy of Warner Bros.
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