The Many Saints of Newark - Three Incomplete Stories
…but great characters!
I finally got around to watching this prequel to The Sopranos—The Many Saints of Newark.
For its time, The Sopranos was a wonderful show about mobsters in New Jersey during the late 1990's. It was one of the two HBO flagship shows at the time, during a time when the network was all about pushing envelopes and showing that they could create content and not just play movies that had been out for a while…a long while, like Super Man 4: The Quest for Peace. Full-frontal female nudity and a lot of f-words was the mainstay. (NSFW but Watch Till the End). This was years ahead of Game of Thrones with its fantasy penises… and dragons.
I’ve seen enough clips from episodes on Instagram to know that a complete re-watch of the series will never happen unless on a dare or a Patreon incentive—some aspects of the show are so over-the-top that they border on absurdity. But the Sopranos was a very important show for many reasons. I could go on and on about the characters—Tony as the anti-hero and how he paved the way for folks like Walter White and Vic Mackey—but this is a post about the Many Saint of Newark and I’m sure the whole anti-hero analysis has been done to death on YouTube.
Let’s get the one great thing this movie did out of the way:
The Characters
Remember in Men in Black 3 when Will Smith went back in time to help a young Tommy Lee Jones played by Josh Brolin? Remember how great Brolin played Tommy Lee Jones? If you don’t remember, take my word for it—Josh Brolin channeled the living soul of Jones so good that you literally believed that Will Smith had indeed travelled back in time to help a young Tommy Lee Jones…Agent K….whatever.
The actors playing the young versions of characters from the original show did a remarkable job—a Josh Brolin performance! Everyone mentioned below stood out. Most notable was Cory Stoll as Uncle Junior, and John Magaro as Silvio Dante. These two actors nailed their counterparts cadence and mannerisms as well as Brolin brought a young Jones to life—Magaro especially! I would have watched two hours of Magaro as Dante.
I would have loved to see that origin story, only for it to end in the future, with an older Steven Van Zandt waking up from a coma. That would have been a solid Sopranos story with something of a happy ending.
Honorable mentions must of course go to Michael Gandolfini, who was a teenage Tony Soprano. I was skeptical of this casting choice but he really delivered, portraying his late father’s best known role very well.
Vera Farmiga’s performance of Livia Soprano was hauntingly good. My ears are still ringing with, “Ohhhh, poor you!”
The character’s from The Sopranos were charactures of how real people are supposed to talk and act. But since the show was a drama, not a sitcom, they mirrored real-life closer than they necessarily should. I think because of this, when a new younger actor takes on the mantle of these characters, they really do something amazing in their portrayals.
Because of all this, I felt that the performance of Alessandro Nivola as anti-hero “Dickie” Moltisanti was both underrated and amazing. The Soprano’s focused on Dickie’s kid, Christopher—under the mobster tutelage of Tony. Dickie had been long dead by the time the HBO show had begun, and the few references to him were told by the unreliable source of Tony himself.
Dickie, as seen in The Sopranos
So to see Christopher’s father, not skewed by Tony’s filters, was refreshing and was what made aspects of the movie enjoyable.
Dickie as seen in The Many Saints of Newark
The Plot
Here where things get dicey. I enjoyed this movie as a fan of the Sopranos—it was good information. It was something I would have enjoyed reading on a Fan Wiki. But the story tried to do too much. Specifically it tried to do 3 things—or tell three different stories all at the same time.
Story # 1 (The Main Story)
…was about Dickie Moltisanti. It’s about his struggles with morality, his struggles with women, and coming to grips with being a key player in the New Jersey Family. He’s very much like an older Tony Soprano—constantly struggling with internal battles, at war with doing right by his family, and doing right by The Family.
To me, this was the main story, the only story. David Chase should have put all his eggs into this one basket.
Story # 2
Young Tony Soprano. This whole storyline felt forced. It’s like, because Tony was the main character of the show, his character had to also get top billing in this story that really didn’t involve him.
I enjoyed the interactions between Young Tony and Dickie because they showed a man who was in the game—Dickie, trying to pull his young nephew into it as well. Young Tony has a bright future both in academics and football, and the temptation is there for him to be part Dickie’s life. We also see scene after scene of Tony getting into trouble with a young Richie Aprile and even Carmella! So there was a lot of room to who Dickie’s influence eventually playing a part in the choices Tony would ultimately make.
Young Tony’s connection with his real father, Johnny Boy, is put on ice when Johnny’s sent to prison. So Dickie filling that void in Tony’s life makes sense.
But there’s no follow-through to this plotline. Dickie has all these moral hang-ups that are never fully developed and Tony is literally left out in the cold with no explanation just before the movie ends. We the audience are left to ‘use our imagination’ to fill in the gaps between Many Saints and Tony becoming a Capo in the DiMeo crime family, but the movie gives us no reason to believe that this will happen.
Were someone to watch Many Saints, then watch the Sopranos, they would probably be surprised that Tony ends up a mobster only because the movie did a good job at letting us think he had a future that was significantly lacking in the crime department—Dickie had shut him out, he wasn’t on the best terms with his own father, and he interacted very little with other members of his family, minus his oppressive mother. In fact, the relationship Tony and Livia had would have only further enforced the notion that Tony would remain on the straight-and-narrow—not become part of the mob—if only to eventually get away from her!
Story # 3
The narrator that came in like a ghost throughout the movie was Christopher Moltisanti, who, if you didn’t already know, was killed by Tony in one of the later seasons of the show. Even though the movie is about the ghost’s dad, it insists on telling us that it’s all about Tony. Even through the amount of screen time that we see Tony is significantly less than Dickie, and that the importance of what Dickie is doing is leaps and bounds greater than the adolescent antics of a teenage Tony, Ghost Christopher insists on refocusing our attention on Tony—he killed me years from now, he’s a dick, I’m so sad because I’m dead, blah blah blah. It was such an unnecessary plotline for a prequel. It didn’t need to be there and it actually took away from the main story concerning Dickie. They would have been better off focusing on Dickie and Tony’s relationship without the damn ghost of Christopher—who got real fucking annoy as the show dragged on.
That’s my take on The Many Saints of Newark. I didn’t hate it but the story was poorly executed and tried to do too much. Unlike the Matrix Resurrections, I enjoyed the info-dump as a fan of the series. It told enough of a compelling story and the colorful characters made up for a lack of any sort of plot. Go watch it if you were a fan of the show…just don’t expect very much from it.
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