James Gandolfini is dead. Those extraordinarily
beautiful, savage, expressive eyes are closed. Gandolfini became famous playing
a series of, to say the least, morally ambiguous characters in films and on
stage. As much as his physical appearance, it was probably his ability to show
the human side of these figures that landed him the lead role in The Sopranos.
When
it ended, after seven seasons, there was a lot of bitching about The Sopranos’ final scene. Me, I liked
it. It provided the only realistic coda to the story of this monster we’d come
to love.
Tony
Soprano is sitting in a New Jersey diner. He’s arrived ahead of his family, and
kills time by picking a song on the juke-box and ordering some onion rings. Having
just come out on top in a brutal mob-war, Tony feels relaxed; comfortable;
safe.
The
story-arc that’s brought us here has seen nearly everyone close to him killed.
His shrink, after years of soul-searching, has finally figured out Tony’s a psychopath
– therefore, worse than incurable – and cut him loose. As his wife and brat
kids begin arriving, the camera hits a note of dissonance. We see a guy
emerging from the men’s room; another sitting at the bar – is he just taking in
the surroundings, or was there something in that look? Is Tony paranoid? Are
we?
Many
viewers felt cheated that we didn’t get to see that bullet pumped into Tony
Soprano’s head. They miss the point the filmmakers are trying to get across:
this is it for Tony; whether now or later, it’s coming. If he doesn’t die of
lung-cancer in a prison infirmary, chances are that, sometime, his kids will
have to see his brains blown out all over his onion rings. He can never relax.
Tony’s life is not glamorous; not something to aspire to; at best, it’s a treadmill
of tedium – at worst, a nightmare for him and anyone unfortunate enough to be
near him.
As
Channel Nine prepares to launch yet another season of Underbelly, rhapsodising yet another thug/pimp/murderer, it’s worth
taking a moment to think about how we react to gangster films. Most of us just
don’t get it. To quote my friend Parkstreet, Underbelly: the Golden Mile turned Kings Cross into Disneyland for
wannabe gangsters. We see, in these films and TV series, people with money and
power; people who are respected or feared; people to whom the normal rules don’t
seem to apply. We glamorise them and miss the ugliness at the heart of their
stories.
Mention
Scarface and someone will almost
certainly come out with, “Say hello to my little friend!” The abiding image is
of a guy with a machine-gun-mounted grenade-launcher, taking on all comers
after snorting a mountain of coke. Most forget that he ends up dead in his
fountain, riddled with bullets, after murdering his best friend and seeing his
sister shot before his eyes.
Even
Michal Corleone in the Godfather films
– a man who genuinely wants to be good – for all his power and wealth, dies
alone and tormented. His family has been destroyed, his daughter killed in
front of him by someone trying to kill him. He feels like he’s sold his soul for some beans.
When
asked why he made the endings of Godfather
Two and Three so dark, Francis
Ford Coppola said it was because the audience somehow missed the point he was
making in the first film: that what these people are doing is bad.
And that was James Gandolfini’s
triumph: to create a character so human, so commonplace – and at the same time
so truly appalling – that we have to relate to him. If we pay attention we can
see ourselves in him, and know that he is nothing we want to be.
Some
actors last for decades, recreating themselves time and again. Others, it
seems, are born for a single role which burns itself indelibly into the
collective consciousness. James Gandolfini was the latter. I’m glad he was with
us a while.
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