With a Bada Whimper
THE SOPRANOS: “MADE IN AMERICA”
HBO
THE NATIONAL POST
Sopranos finale couldn't meet its own expectations
Mother of God, what was the end of Tony? There he was, as so often before, in a restaurant with his immediate family, or three-quarters of it: Meadow was late. The room was filled with menacing strangers, or just ordinary customers who seemed menacing because The Sopranos was on its final countdown and something had to happen. Tony had chosen a song from the jukebox: “Don't Stop Believing”. And, at the words "don't stop," everything did. The sound cut out and the screen went to black, as viewers all over North America cursed their TV sets for breaking down at this of all moments. A couple of seconds of this. Roll credits.
A lot of people felt cheated. Some think the ending means that Tony got whacked. They point to Bobby Baccilieri at the beginning of this final season saying that you don't see or hear your own whacking; everything just goes black and stops. Not that that's how it seemed to go down for Bobby when he got his in the model-train store during the penultimate episode. At the end of that show, Tony had a flashback to their conversation, which might have been premonitory. It's likelier, though, that it was David Chase messing with our minds. I don't think Tony died. In fact, if that's what we're meant to believe, then I do feel cheated. If it was going to happen, I wanted to see it.
What I felt was shock, followed by frustration that was almost immediately overtaken by a sense of fitness. On a narrative level we got the "life goes on" ending that many of us had come to expect. I would guess that if Chase had ended the show a couple seasons ago, as he once threatened, he would have settled for Tony being either killed or sent down for a good long time.
Compare that to now: Pussy and Christopher dead by Tony's own hands (literally in Chris's case), Silvio on life-support, Paulie cajoled or coerced into taking a Crew-Captain's job he feels to be jinxed, Tony's relations with his wife and kids in a permanent state of runaround. Hesh, Artie, Uncle Junior and, most woundingly, Dr. Melfi are all, in their different ways, out of his life. The restaurant is now a run-of-the-mill diner (a possible significance of the episode title, “Made in America”), and nobody seems to demur at the choice. Expectations have been scaled-down all round. And the FBI are closing in with charges that Tony's lawyer warns him he's unlikely to beat.
On the plus side, he's made his peace with New York. Phil Leotardo, disowned by his subordinates, has been gruesomely disposed of, gunned down in his car like so many others. His twin grandchildren were in child-seats in the back, leaving his wife - sorry, widow - uncertain what to be more distraught about. It seemed unlikely that anything could make us feel sorry for Phil, but this scene managed it; his one redeeming feature was that he was gentle with his kids. Tony was tipped off to Phil's whereabouts by Agent Harris, his surprise new friend and kindred spirit. In one of the episode's more delicious moments, we saw Harris with his very own goomar, a lady agent whose post-coital confidence, judging from her expression, he had just betrayed. Right to the finish, this show could give us a whole character in a single silent moment. There's nobody left with an obvious motive to do Tony in. But one doubts that Phil's death gave him much satisfaction. One doubts that anything does.
If that were all, the show could have ended on a bittersweet fade-out. The cut to black was more like a slap in the face. It was also a shared joke, less about the show as narrative than about our expectations of it. Over the years, The Sopranos has created a unique bond with its audience. We have bought into it on a deep level, one that partakes of soap opera (as most drama does) but also transcends it. We have wanted to know what, finally, happens to these people. It's a tribute to the writing, and perhaps even more, to the acting, which, from the highest ranks to the lowest, has rarely been less than superb.
If the actors were perfectly cast in the first place, they were then given the chances to dig and to expand, and they took them. What other show, to take a single example, could have created and then dropped a figure as compelling as Svetlana, the sexy, one-legged Russian caregiver? We were left longing for closure and dreading it, partly because we simply didn't want the show to end, partly because we sensed that any definitive ending would be unsatisfying - there were just too many possibilities to choose from. Hence the extraordinary tension of the last episode, far exceeding that of its more obviously action-packed predecessor.
We were certainly teased with possibilities and allusions. A man disappeared into the washroom and we half expected him to come out with guns blazing, like Al Pacino in The Godfather. Meadow was late because she was terrible at parallel parking, but this, both funny and suspenseful, turned out to signify nothing beyond itself. The show did, in fact, offer more closure than you might think - most of the storylines and character-arcs were tidied up in downbeat ways - but as for what "really" happened, or would happen, to Tony himself, we don't know. In most TV shows, it wouldn't matter. But The Sopranos pretty much created its own form. No other TV drama has gone on so long, so well, with so persistent a narrative thread so brilliantly diversified, and in doing so it created expectations that couldn't possibly be met. And it ended by acknowledging that.
Immediately before tuning in for the last episode, I re-watched the first, and it was fascinating to see how the surfaces had changed while the essentials remained the same. Everything was very clearly laid out, with far less subtext than we've become accustomed to and a lot of voice-over. James Gandolfini's Tony was as brutal and as charming as ever, but far more open-faced, less creased. Robert Iler's A.J. was just a pudgy little boy, and presumably cast for that reason. The way in which his character has developed (it never, of course, matured) now seems extraordinary. The fractious relationship between Tony and Carmela was already in place; so, to an amazing degree, was that between Tony and Chris. Tony's awareness that he had "come in at the end" was proclaimed at the very start and has only got sadder.
There was, too, our unwillingness - reflected, almost to the end, in Dr. Melfi - to give up on Tony, and his discomforting inability to let us. The received wisdom is that in the last season, Tony irredeemably coarsened. I don't agree. Even in his final, shell-like state, he was insisting that Bobby's children be provided for, and if some of that was self-interest (if others paid, he wouldn't have to) not all of it was. You can't speak of Tony's "flashes" of humanity; he's been human all the way through. That doesn't make him a tragic hero - one more reason for denying him a tragic ending. But he may be an example of tragic waste. Or, bearing in mind what he's always passed off as his primary line of work, Tragic Waste Disposal.