What we get in the movie, directed by Alan Taylor from a script by “Sopranos” capo David Chase and Lawrence Konner, is two hours of reach exceeding grasp, a jumble of moments that often only toggle between the exasperating and repellent.
The movie opens with an evocative crane shot, that turns into a dolly shot, of a cemetery; the voices of the dead on a rainy afternoon crowd the soundtrack. One voice begins to take over: that of Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli, of the series, contributes his voice), who discusses his life and its end. “He choked me to death,” he says flatly about a key character from the series. This arguably teases the notion that here, you will find out why. At least if you don’t know the series. If you do know the series, you do know why. Or at least you know it takes place in a world where “whys” can be provisional, fleeting, flaky, in part because it’s a world of psychopaths, not to put too fine a point on it.
Is psychopathy hereditary? One can’t really say. One can say that both Dickie Moltisanti, Christopher’s father, and “Hollywood” Dick Moltisanti are guys with one if not more screws loose; brash, violent, impulsive men. “Hollywood” steps off a boat from Italy with a trophy wife maybe a third his age who catches younger Dickie’s eye, but one doesn’t make too much of it because one can’t really. Soon we’re getting a peek into a part of the family business, a numbers-running operation aided and abetted by some African-American hustlers, chief among them Leslie Odom, Jr.’s Harold. In a dispiriting early example of the all-caps EXPOSITIONAL dialogue, one character in an African-American home proclaims, “The numbers are the only way black folks got to get out of this sinkhole city.” Thanks for the tip.
As the series “The Sopranos” evolved, growing in smarts and refinement even before its first season concluded, its expansiveness allowed for more and more authorial detachment and performance nuance. The viewer was afforded the opportunity to step back and really feel the humanity of characters that persisted beyond the awful actions those characters so frequently committed. One of my favorite “Sopranos” moments is at the end of the seventh episode, in which Tony makes ice cream sundaes for himself and A.J. Aside from being a virtuosic bit of acting from James Gandolfini, there’s a powerful sense of affinity and restfulness here that makes the viewer understand there are some laudable values that Tony has some connection to. For now. There’s none of that in “Many Saints.” While the film strives, none too mightily, to establish a duality for Dickie Moltisanti, Alessandro Nivola’s performance in the role never catches enough of a groove to make such an idea signify.
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