The Many Saints Of Newark

The Many Saints Of Newark opens with a camera crawling through a graveyard filled with headstones of Italian Americans and a narration from a familiar voice. If you haven't seen The Sopranos and this is your first introduction to their world then you'll face a massive spoiler from the off. TBH if this is all new to you, you won't get what all the buzz was about at all. If it's not new to you, you may will end up sorely disappointed by what you're about to see. 

"It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that and I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over."

One of the best remembered quotes from The Sopranos. Tony Soprano talking to his therapist Dr Melfi about a time long gone. A time we never got to see apart from the odd flashback. A time David Chase has been talking about revisiting for what seems like forever. Now 14 years after that (in)famous cut to black we get to go back and take a proper look at Newark of the 60's and 70's and the people who inhabited it. We might even get to see who turned T into the man he was. 

Eh......

Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola), man about town, a connected guy, an up and comer in the Di Meo crime family of  New Jersey. Him and his cousins Johnny Boy Soprano (John Bernthal) and Junior Soprano (Corey Stoll) are making names for themselves but it's not all peaches and cream for Dickie. His wife is having trouble conceiving and his father, Hollywood Dick (Ray Liotta), has a new wife, Giuseppina (Michela De Rossi), who's been catching his eye lately while a former employee called Harold MacBrayer (Leslie Odom Jr) is off doing his own thing. Oh and Newark is burning down all around them. Away from the criminal side of things is his nephew Tony (Michael Gandolfini), a teenager torn between two worlds, one represented by Dickie, Johnny and Junior and the other by his overbearing mother Livia (Vera Farmiga). The streets of Newark are packed with many saints. Which of them will succeed in getting into his head?

It's been a long time since I left a cinema this disappointed. Fans going in expecting mob warfare and a multitude of bloody murders will be let down. Fans expecting a deep dive into the dysfunctional family of Tony Soprano will be left wanting. Anyone looking forward to the comedy genius the show was once capable of will be totally disenchanted. Those clever storylines knocked sideways by leftfield plot developments are nowhere to be seen here. What you will get are numerous anti climactic moments, dreadful impersonations of characters you once loved and a feeling that this should have been so so much better. Longtime watchers will remember numerous times when you expected the show to go one way before it went off somewhere extremely unexpected. Richie Aprile's faithful dinner with Janice, Tony B's countryside hideaway, the Pie-O-My incident, the Pine Barren's saga. Out of the blue twists that turned into water cooler moments. It was never what you expected but you didn't care because you knew these characters and wanted to spend time with them no matter what they were up to. Here we get Dickie Moltisanti, who like his son Christopher, is a weak, selfish asshole, but unlike Christopher, we've no emotional attachment to him, we couldn't care less how his story goes, so when the expected Sopranos about turn, that you'll see coming from a mile away, happens all you think is "Is that it?" We just don't get enough time with him to care about him and his story just falls flat.

Tony's side of the story is more successful because we knew him intimately, we knew what he's about, the kind of man he grew up to be. We knew he had a human side and here we get to see it in spades, he wants to be good, he cares about his family and watching Michael Gandolfini step into his father James's shoes to play the role that made him famous is goosebump inducing stuff. The mannerisms are down cold, the sulks, the sideways looks, the fact that he looks so like him. A kitchen scene with his mother Livia will bring you right back to season 1 of the show. You know there's love there, but there's an edge, a coldness too, a sense it could all go bad with one wrong word. It's the best scene in a film that should have been full of brilliance. Vera Farmiga nails it here without feeling like an impression of Nancy Marchand. Unfortunately, as good as Gandolfini is as Tony, we never really get a sense of why he took the direction he does and just as the film starts to tell us it finishes with a pinky swear, some familiar music and another "Is that it?"

'Impressions' is a word that will linger in your head long after you've seen this. Especially John Magaro's excruciatingly bad turn as Silvio Dante. The Silvio of the show was mostly comic relief, always there to reign Tony in, ready to settle things with a joke or a Michael Corleone imitation but Steve Van Zandt made the part his own, made him feel real. Magaro plays him like something you'd hear in a pub, a broad copy and paste version and it's just dreadful. Corey Stoll's Junior is almost as bad, a man made of clumsy awkwardness, social faux pas's and genitalia references whenever things don't go his way. Stoll's performance feels like it took an awful battering in the editing suite and on numerous occasions you'll wonder just how much story was cut out to hit that magic 2 hr running time because it just feels way too clipped and choppy in parts. Then in others it feels like David Chase had a checkpoint of things he wanted to squeeze in as nods to fans of the show as familiar surnames like Overall and Piocosta fly by, Holsten's diner appears knowingly, we spend a minute or two with characters like Paulie Gualtieri (another awful impersonation of Tony Sirico's brilliant creation by Billy Magnusson) and Pussy Bonpensiero, see glimpses of Carmela DeAngelis, Artie Bucco and Jackie Aprile, even Hesh Rabkin gets mentioned in passing. It's purely fan service and all it will do is remind you of what could have been.

There might have been a great miniseries here. Five or six hours to let the story breathe, let us get to know the new faces and give us more time with the old faves. Instead we get a two hr story of two halves, one a history lesson about Newark combined with a half hearted introduction to someone we barely get to know and the other a top heavy nostalgia fest that never lives up to it's promise.

The Many Saints Of Newark is out now in cinemas. I really hope Sopranos fans like it more than I did.