The Sopranos Prequel The Many Saints of Newark Predictably Pales in Comparison

I spent most of 2020 getting through The Sopranos. It was my pandemic comfort, an engrossing, funny and constant plodding towards destruction that was oddly reassuring compared to the chaos out there in the real world. When I finished the series, I sat with it for a week—buzzing—before digging into Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz’s phenomenal The Sopranos Sessions. It was the only post-mortem I needed for the series, dense and exploratory and as familiar to me as the gabagoons I’d come to know, love and loathe. Now, prequel movie The Many Saints of Newark brings subtlety to the surface and turns implied influences into physical beings by anthropomorphizing a new, condensed tale of doomed and petty gangsterism into a father figure for Tony Soprano: Dickie Moltisanti.

Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola), long-dead father of the series’ Christopher (Michael Imperioli, who opens the film with ridiculous voiceover), has always been more symbol than man. He was a legend. A martyr. An honorable headstone that an aspiring made man could respect. And one whose legacy was a lie. Not only a lie, but a lie that left his son in the hands of a monster. In the show, he was a perfect encapsulation of the life’s fallacy: A lauded and respected badass…whose death was orchestrated by a friend, covered up, and led his family to ruin. But in case that wasn’t clear, in case this magnetic cycle of masculine failure went over people’s heads, The Many Saints of Newark gives us The Sopranos Lite featuring Mr. Moltisanti himself.

Written by showrunner David Chase and series writer Lawrence Konner, and directed by Alan Taylor—consistently solid on TV, winning an Emmy for “Kennedy and Heidi,” and consistently underwhelming on the big screen, winning my scorn for Thor: The Dark World—The Many Saints of Newark tracks the major moments in Moltisanti’s life in order to explain how Tony Soprano came to be, and to show that nothing has changed since the ‘60s and ‘70s. Moltisanti and the Italians see their control of the city (and its organized crime) challenged by an increasingly confident Black community—led by ex-Moltisanti friend/employee Harold McBrayer (Leslie Odom Jr.). If you haven’t seen the show, this’ll give you a watered-down, condensed (probably confusing) version of its message and vibe. If you have, it’ll play like a long recap with all the good stuff replaced by winks and nudges.

Of course, the film is haunted by Tony and, to an extent, the late James Gandolfini. Seeing his face, grinning and pouting on his son Michael (game but underwhelming as young Tony) is uncanny. Tony’s always lurking in the corners of the film, inspiring some of the movie’s dumbest, broadest omens—baby Christopher cries whenever Tony is near; Tony witnessing birds symbolizing death—that are consistently explained with further dialogue for the audience members who, I guess, wandered into the wrong theater on their way back from the bathroom and are wondering what the hell is going on in Jersey.

This inelegance is the true throughline of The Many Saints of Newark, some of it inherent to its very existence. The people that made The Sopranos making a Sopranos movie means a head-on collision of form. It means rushing through the shorthand events of a Sopranos season—an arrival, a dangerous desire, a holiday and funerals galore—struggling to fit long, violent arcs of passion-resentment-fury into a movie’s finite runtime and rhythms. Nothing works quite right, even the Easter eggs. The namedrops and needledrops might net a few drops of serotonin through sheer association (AKA the thing they’re designed to do), but the distraction is clownish and pandering. Even the lowest-brow mispronunciation gags in The Sopranos had an air of erudition, or at least a respect for its audience. (Knowing a viewer likes a dumb joke now and then can still be respectful.) Here you get bad biopic levels of “Hey, look who it is!” And sometimes, more egregiously, “Hey, look what this means!”