Television dramas still wriggle under the shadow of “The Sopranos.”
Creator David Chase, a veteran of series like “The Rockford Files” and “Northern Exposure,” blended the specificity of Martin Scorsese’s gangland dramas with the dreamscapes of David Lynch with the self-help obsession that has become a reliable industry in this country. Tying the room together is Chase’s sense of humor, which would often surface during the show’s most depraved sequences. We haven’t even gotten to the acting or that ending. Alright, alright, I’m not here to re-litigate “The Sopranos” I don’t think …
Alex Gibney’s “Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos” is less concerned with finding new angles on this monolith than with instilling oft-told tales with newfound vulnerability. Gibney, the prolific documentarian who specializes in touchy subjects, has built a set here that resembles the psychiatrist’s office that functioned as a central setting of “The Sopranos.” Chase sits more or less where the panic attack-plagued New Jersey gangster Tony Soprano once sat, and Gibney takes Dr. Melfi’s place. The idea is so literal it’s divine: put the creator of the ultimate head-shrinking show on the couch.
Chase has been talking about “The Sopranos” for decades now and he’s trying to get “over it” and yet Gibney manages to engage him. This is the professional accomplishment of Chase’s life, a personal family saga forged by decades of struggle, and he will always be answering for it. As hokey as the notion of putting him in Melfi’s office in Tony’s place may be, it tickles Chase the artist and opens him up. Under his persnickety demeanor is unsurprisingly, a wounded poet. Gibney knows when to push and when to hang back, and they develop an engaging rhythm. “Wise Guy” runs almost 3 hours and follows numerous strands, but Chase is the film’s guiding light and soul.
Gibney unearths a number of remarkable artifacts here, particularly audition tapes that show the eventual cast and a host of unknowns trying out for roles that would become iconic. These tapes underscore the fragility of art-making: One different decision and you’ve got an entirely new show. E Street Band legend Steven Van Zandt was Chase’s first choice for Tony, but HBO wanted someone with acting experience. Van Zandt would, of course, be cast as Silvio, strip club owner and Tony’s consigliere. As good as Van Zandt would prove to be as “Sil,” I can’t imagine him as Tony. Van Zandt is too much of a, well, rock star. The brilliance of James Gandolfini’s performance is that it never lost sight of the fact that Tony is essentially a boy, who’s heartbroken even when doing the unforgivable. Chase even says this to Gibney at one point in the film.
Your affection for “The Sopranos” is taken as a given by Gibney, but “Wise Guy” manages not to be a superficial meeting of the Mutual Admiration Society. When Edie Falco, who played Tony’s wife, Carmella, is interviewed here, she addresses the fact that Gandolfini gave cast and crew members checks for $30,000 after he held out for more money for himself from HBO. Falco, not a beneficiary of that largesse, seems hurt but not surprised. He was like that, Falco says, generous. A writer, Robin Green, admits to being fired by Chase, as she was burning out on the show’s relentless production schedule.
The “Sopranos” writers’ room allowed Chase and the other scripters to go wherever they needed to go emotionally, mining their pasts for the darkness that entertainment usually dilutes. This room didn’t utilize an assistant because they had HR concerns. They needed to feel free, as in therapy. As Green says, anyone could’ve mistaken them for racists, misogynists, etc. Green hints at what so many TV shows and movies lack now: the willingness to show very human darkness without sanitizing it with apologias or preaching or trigger warnings. As Falco says herself here, art is meant to trigger you.
“The Sopranos” is not interested in furthering a civics project. It is a neurotic work of art about people who are evil and, often, likable. The allowance that evil can be appealing is the show’s most disturbing accomplishment. Maybe it’s not even that it allows evil to be appealing, but normal. Tony can have a father-daughter moment with Meadow right before strangling someone to death, and his mind can slot each of those actions into a different place. Astonishingly, the show conditions us to slot these actions in different places, as we do in our own lives. We may not be killers, but most of us have done things that we file away for not affirming our idea of ourselves, yes?
I’m hardly the first person to admit that Tony is dangerously appealing. The audiences’ love affair with the Soprano boss annoyed Chase, who kept reasserting his awfulness, but Chase couldn’t dilute the effect of Gandolfini’s narcotic charisma. The push-and-pull between Chase and Gandolfini was the motor of the show, off and onscreen.
Gibney and Chase and the various other people interviewed here are straightforward about the fact that mining human darkness, even in a fictional context, has a toll. Working conditions were brutal, relationships were tattered, and addictions flourished. Part of the point of the gimmick of placing Chase in a simulation of Melfi’s office is to assert that “The Sopranos” itself was a therapy project, for a depressive man with a difficult relationship with his mother who finally found the right means towards expressing his ambivalence, as well as, per his prior TV show experience, the chops to render his scars entertaining. And in Gandolfini, Chase found a volatile surrogate.
Gandolfini’s performance across seven seasons remains staggering. Tony is a rich and contradictory character, a swaggering monster somehow with the pathos of Arthur Miller’s salesman. Gandolfini never let you catch him acting, to the point that you can forget, even if you’ve seen him in films, that Tony’s voice is an accent. But his achievement had a steep price. Perhaps Gandolfini saw himself in Tony, hating what he saw. The realism of the performance is partially a form of emotional autobiography.
Gibney and Chase do not shy away from Gandolfini’s problems in “Wise Guy:” The actor was an alcoholic and drug abuser and overeater who leaned into his many demons to give Tony his battered soul. There’s vivid footage here of Gandolfini screwing around on set, wasting time, and in the process finding Tony’s alienated heartbeat. Gandolfini died six years after “The Sopranos” ended, in 2013 at the age of 51, from a heart attack in Italy. Gibney asks Chase if he was surprised and he says no.
That “no” is freighted with resignation. The second half of “Wise Guy,” dealing with Gandolfini’s rise and fall, is its most wrenching, especially Chase’s eulogy for a man who was a muse, a friend, an enormous pain in the ass, a man in crisis. “Wise Guy” gives you all the production gossip that you can hope for from a behind-the-scenes feature, and imbues it with a sense of Pyrrhic victory and tragedy.
Lana Wilson’s documentary “Look into My Eyes” is elementally simple on visual terms, or at least appears to be. Much of it is composed of close-ups of faces, framed from the point of view of the person to whom the subjects are respectively speaking. These people are consulting with psychics, and these talks resemble, well, therapy, only with a hint of mystical enchantment. The shots gradually open up over the course of the film, as we come to know the psychics as well, and they are as tormented as their clients. Many of them are lonely, unfulfilled artists who’ve found an unconventional medium.
Wilson’s stripped-down approach is extraordinarily effective. There’s no onscreen text, narration, or conventional outside context provided so as to orient us. We are dropped without ceremony into these sessions and asked to swim for ourselves, and it’s freeing when a filmmaker has that trust in us. This approach also puts us in the uncertain shoes of the psychics’ clients, who are often embarrassed to admit that they want answers.
The psychics aren’t identified by name in the film. They are a motley crew of various ages and ethnicities, and these identifies are shown to affect their lives in fashions that films often fail to imagine. There is a profoundly moving sequence in which a psychic, a Black woman, appears to help a man who is struggling with the fact that his grandfather was a slave. When this man discovered the specific price that his grandfather was sold for, it demoralizes him. The psychic tells him that his grandfather wants him to live free, to accept the different opportunities available to him in this different age.
Wilson balances heavy sequences like this with scenes that capture more intimate and everyday textures of life, such a moment with an elderly woman who wonders if her dog loves her. These people are united as lost souls seeking psychic phenomena the way that some people seek religion, and the psychics themselves are often as lost. Wilson has no interest in debating whether psychics are real or not, recognizing that distinction as immaterial. If people need something, then it is real.
“Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos” is now streaming on Max. “Look into My Eyes” is now playing at Movieland.
