A Character We Won't Soon Fugged About

THE SOPRANOS: The Passing of James Gandolfini
HBO
THE NATIONAL POST

For 15 years it's been impossible to see or hear the word "mafia" without conjuring up a mental picture of James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano.

The word itself was rarely heard in The Sopranos, and when it did turn up it was uttered in tones of angry denial. Most famously there was the early episode in which Tony's daughter, Meadow, asked him about his possible membership, and got the blustering reply that no such organization existed; it was just "an ugly stereotype."

There was a lot of Gandolfini's Tony in that exchange: the forcefulness, the evasiveness, the desperate desire to be thought well of by his own family and, ultimately, by himself. Also the perverse pride in his own heritage. (At the other end of the show's life, he denounced the movie made by his nephew, Christopher, as "a very unflattering picture of Italian Americans," thereby both echoing and pre-empting critics of the story of which he himself was the protagonist.)

Tony, sensing Meadow was too smart to be altogether taken in, went on to admit that some of his income perhaps derived from businesses that weren't strictly legal. Then, later in the hour, we saw him skilfully and enthusiastically garrotting an informer from his past. The brutality seemed to come as naturally to him as the earlier protectiveness.

It seems appropriate that the actor responsible for Tony Soprano should have died on a visit to Italy; mournfully fitting, too, that the apparent cause of death should have been a heart attack, a fate for which Tony himself, a conflicted man carrying a lot of physical and emotional weight, had often seemed a likely candidate. It was startling, as well as sad, to learn that Gandolfini was only 51 at his death; that means that in 1999, when he started playing Tony, he would have been in his late thirties. That's not an implausible age for the character, but he always registered as older - though if you look again at the first season, he does seem more open and less creased than he subsequently became.

Because he aged with the character over several years, partly as well because he was little known before he took the role, James Gandolfini convinced us all that he was Tony Soprano. This, of course, had its unfortunate side-effects; it meant he could never shake the image of Tony in his subsequent movie roles (Zero Dark Thirty, for example); we were always glad to see him, but we could never quite believe in him. (The magnificent Edie Falco, who played opposite him as Carmela, has never had that problem; admittedly hers was a subordinate role, but I doubt that even Nurse Jackie, of which she's unquestionably the star, will haunt her career as Tony did Gandolfini's.)

A recurring and defining characteristic of Gandolfini's Tony was the way he would shake his head and smile whenever he held a secret advantage over his colleagues and/or rivals; when he knew what was going down, and they didn't know he knew. He was always a cut above them, more intelligent and in his way more sensitive; and it was Gandolfini's communication of this that, more than anything else, provided the tension that kept the show alive.

We always hoped and expected better of him, even while recognizing he was unlikely to provide it. We even dreamed (as he did) that he might some day get out of the Life altogether, while knowing (also as he did) that he never could. This conflict, explored at such length in such detail and reflected among the other characters, gave the show, as it quickly became commonplace to point out, the density of a great novel.

We could never be sure of Tony: never know when he would scare us to death or when he would move us to tears. The latter was likeliest to occur in his fleeting, self-conscious relationship with his son, Anthony Jr.; sharing a furtive dish of ice cream with him early on, or showing him how to change a tire. ("We do it ourselves in this house.") In the final season, in one of his last consultations with Dr. Melfi, he spoke of how, when your children are ill you long to change places with them and take their pain; Gandolfini made you aware both of the reality of the feelings and of the sinister limitations of the space in which they operated. It may, when it occurred, have been Tony's most moving scene, but it was topped by the wrenching, unforgettable episode in which AJ tried to commit suicide in his parents' pool. Tony, seeing it just in time, threw down the sandwich he was eating, jumped in and rescued him. His first reaction after fishing the boy out was to shake him and say angrily, "What's wrong with you?"

His next was to ask: "Are you all right?" And his third was to break down in tears, hold him and say, over and over, "Oh, my baby." In a way, it brought father as well as son back from the brink. Tony, who the previous week had murdered his surrogate son, Chris, now saved his real one, proving, I guess, that blood really is thicker even than the water of an attempted drowning. Keeping AJ happy and uninvolved would have been Tony's idea of salvation, but he seemed unlikely to get it; AJ too seemed by the end to be destined for life as a gangster, just not a very effective one.

We couldn't be sure, of course, any more than we could be sure of what would happen to Tony himself; the show's notorious non-ending, leaving us all hanging, was surely an acknowledgment that any conclusion to a story so layered, so complex, would have to seem glib, and that we were better off without one. (There have always been rumours of a sequel or a movie. Now, that can plainly never happen; and it's hard to imagine that it could ever have been anything but a let-down.) It was appropriate, too, that the last scene should have been a family dinner; however wide it spread its net, The Sopranos was always a show about a family - and not, primarily, in the criminal sense. It's why, perhaps perversely, we think of it as a warm show, and of The Wire, its only rival for the title of best American drama series and one with its own supply of heart-breaking moments, as a cold one; its focus was professional rather than personal.

How much the superb acting and writing of The Sopranos owed to one another is impossible to know, though it's obvious that they grew symbiotically. At its centre was the greatest character television has ever created. A gangster walked into a psychiatrist's office, and walked out a legend: an outsider and an everyman.