THE SOPRANOS: SEASON SIX, PART 1
HBO
Not Rated
THE VERDICT:
Though not as fast-paced as previous seasons, this generation of the Sopranos
legacy balances the lack of action with the exploration of deeper themes.
FEATURE: 3.5/4 stars
EXTRA: 2/4 stars
The first line of dialogue in season six of HBO’s powerhouse Mafia drama “The Sopranos” comes from an FBI agent, though it feels straight from the lips of series creator David Chase. “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public,” says the agent, which prompts his partner to vomit onto a curb.
On a DVD commentary track for the episode “Kaisha,” Chase sarcastically addresses the disappointment of some fans in the series’ more brooding, less bloodthirsty sixth season. It’s “the famous show where nothing happens,” he chides. Later in the same episode: “The store gets blown up – another example of nothing happening.”
Though Chase’s nose-thumbing isn’t entirely off-base, neither are audience grumbles about low body counts and slower pacing. Always a maze of character contradictions and existential crises, the show stares even deeper inward in the sixth season as mob boss Tony (James Gandolfini), gut-shot by an Alzheimer’s-ridden Uncle Junior, survives a coma and comes out of his near-death experience with a new outlook on life.
“Supposed to be dead,” says Tony. “Now I’m alive. I’m the luckiest guy in the whole world … from now on, every day is a gift.”
Needless to say, Tony’s rose-colored glasses don’t jibe well with the day-to-day operations of his “waste management” business, but even the world of crime may have room for some compromise. “Truth be told,” says the born-again boss, “there’s enough garbage for everybody.”
Momentary hopefulness aside, however, the bread and butter of “The Sopranos” has always been a sense of dread and impending violence, which Season Six provides in spades. Tony’s new Zen philosophy comes off as weakness, especially when he gives a pass to goodfella Vito, who gets outed as a homosexual and flees Jersey for fear of his life. Much of the second half of the season revolves around whether or not the missing mobster will be caught, by whom and what retribution will follow.
Though the show still revolves around who’s gonna get whacked and why, this season deals with other, perhaps more troubling, issues. As Tony lies comatose, he dreams of an alternate life as a legit businessman away from home on a convention trip. He keeps seeing a white light in the distance, a sort of beacon atop a tower, though it’s never clear what the light is. As he wakes up mid-surgery, he frantically asks, “Who am I?! Where am I going?!” It’s that question that drives the remainder of the season, working its way into the other characters’ psyches whether they know it or not.
This season resonates with the fallout from Tony’s choices in life, with just as much emphasis on roads not taken as on those traveled down ill-advisedly. Recovering Tony becomes attracted to a sexy real estate developer, but he chooses not to bed her because of how his great wife Carmela (Edie Falco) treated him while he was in the hospital. Yet that simple, good decision comes back to haunt him in later episodes. As Carm’s father puts it in the season opener, “No good deed goes unpunished.”
There are a lot of big questions in play. What is weakness? Can Tony’s soul be saved, and if so, how, why and by what higher power? If everything is connected, if “everything is everything,” then how can good and evil be mutually exclusive?
Though this season doesn’t have the same re-watch value as earlier ones, it still has moments of perfection that never get old. The performances, as ever, are astonishing, especially Gandolfini, Imperioli, Sirico (a great sad clown) and Falco, whose towering work was criminally snubbed by Emmy voters this summer. Six seasons worth of emotion and character history come flooding out of her as she searches for her own sense of self on a trip to Paris and as she weeps at her husband’s hospital bedside that he is “not going to hell;” it’s a simply incredible performance.
There’s the usual “Sopranos” speak (“The Hairdo, he’s in a beef with the Jew”), awful jokes (Vito gets called “La Cage Aux Fat”), malapropisms (Chris calls a popular crime drama “Law and Order: The SUV”) and darkly humorous mayhem (Lauren Bacall getting punched in the nose).
And there are more missteps than usual, not too surprising for a season this ambitious. The whole Vito plotline makes a strong point, but it’s played more as an ongoing essay than as a flesh-and-blood character arc. It doesn’t help that Joseph R. Gannascoli is too blank a performer to make howlers like “I love you, johnnycakes” seem like anything but. There’s also his wholly unbelievable love interest, a motorcyclist/fry cook/volunteer fireman, Morgan Spurlock-looking gay single father, a mishmash of stereotype and sketch that, no matter how sympathetically played, never amounts to more than a ridiculous conceit of the show’s writers.
Despite its occasional faults, this season packs an emotional punch that its predecessors hinted at but never fully embraced, from Carm’s emotional outbursts to Chris’s long slide into bottomless despair to a devastating flashback that shows exactly what happened in Tony’s basement when Christopher came to tell him that Adriana was a federal informant.
The mini-season ends appropriately with a family Christmas that is both warm and bitterly cold. There is love in the Soprano household, but its foundation is fragile, seemingly doomed by Tony’s choices in life. The simplest twist of fate could leave his family shattered. “You have a beautiful home,” says AJ’s girlfriend. Carmela agrees. Silence follows. On the commentary track, Chase breaks the spell with three words: “At what cost?”
“The Sopranos: Season Six, Part 1” plays like the calm before a final storm. It’s a heartbreaking coming to terms, the last sober moments of introspection before a fatal reckoning.