Kevin John Bozelka: The Many Saints of Newark (Alan Taylor, 2021)

The problem with Peak/Prestige TV's serial narrative form is that, at some point, the shows have to end. And like the de facto soap operas that they are, they can't end, not without upsetting their rabid audiences. The Sopranos circumvented this problem with the (genius, godlike) decision to have the show stop as if it were a Warhol film rather than end like a traditional narrative. Naturally, that pissed off most of the fans. But they needn't have fretted. In the franchisescape that is mainstream media today, you simply have to wait fourteen years for another installment. Hence, The Many Saints of Newark, a prequel which David Chase is trying to pass off as a standalone film.

Qua film, it's a mess. Taylor/Chase parade so many characters in front of us for the first twenty or so minutes that even seasoned Sopranos freaks will need a family tree (a common problem in many films, though, cf. Sidney Lumet's 1966 film adaptation of The Group). Eventually, though, it settles into a story about not a young Tony Soprano (Michael Gandolfini) but rather his idol Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola), infuriating some fans all over again.

But The Many Saints of Newark is not a film; it's a cog in the Sopranos franchise, one that will no doubt inspire another series especially now that David Chase has another HBO deal. After all, Chase will have all of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s to play with. So it doesn't matter how uneven or clipped or messy this particular film is. It will get ironed out with The Sopranos II c. 2023.

I will say that the use of music in The Many Saints of Newark continues Chase's mastery of distance. Van Morrison's title track from Astral Weeks plays over a romantic scene with Dickie and, at first, it sits uncomfortably on top. But the romance soon turns horrifying so that the Morrison track serves more as an ambiguous portent than a bucolic reverie. Even more bewilderingly, the scene ends with Mountain's hard rock "Never in My Life," a complete sonic 180. But it's a sound advance from the following scene with a young Tony in his room listening to Mountain through purloined speakers given to him (forced on him, really) by Dickie. It catapults the viewer out of the scenes in an attempt to gain some distance from the psychoses of these character-idols.

And there's a hilarious moment when Dickie visits his uncle Sally (Ray Liotta) in prison. Sally has become woke in lockup (meditating, eating healthy foods, listening to bebop) and asks Dickie to get him a copy of Miles Davis' Birth of the Cool. He brings him one along with other albums such as The Happy Trumpet by perennial dollar-bin artist Al Hirt ("He's on Carson all the time."). Sally tosses it aside as "not jazz" along with the rest of Dickie's clueless choices (anyone know what the other album is in the first screen grab?).