The Many Saints of Newark

What more can be said about The Sopranos at this point? I’ll add this much: it gets better with age, and not just because it still stands out as one of the best examples of the long-form prestige TV that it pioneered. When I first watched as a teenager who had just gotten into gangster movies like GoodFellas, I loved the show for all the mobster action and its cinematic quality (and swearing and sex and violence), which at the time still seemed fairly new for television. Watching it again for the first time in years as a thirtysomething during last year's pandemic lockdown, the mob stuff still entertained me, but suddenly the domestic and family drama really hit home.

The long-awaited and year-delayed prequel The Many Saints of Newark, unfortunately, can’t carry such a dramatic load. It certainly has the feel of the series, with the prestige sheen (specifically, that of the show’s flashback episodes) and the structure which cuts between several players in an ensemble narrative. But it feels like catching an episode in the middle of a season, with pieces of stories and no context to what’s going on except some character names viewers of the show might recognize. Not that there's ultimately much going on here.

The film tells the story of Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola), the until now-unseen father of Michael Imperioli’s Christopher (who offers scant narration and appears briefly as an infant). In the 1960s and 70s, Dickie is a member of New Jersey’s DiMeo crime family, living large and crossing paths with several Sopranos characters in their younger days. During the 1967 Newark riots, Dickie’s Black associate Harold (Leslie Odom Jr.) flees the city to avoid a murder rap. But in the early 70s, Harold resurfaces hungry for his own criminal empire, and attempts to bloodily push Dickie and the Italians out of the city’s numbers racket. Through all this, Dickie catches the eye of the young Tony Soprano (Michael Gandolfini), who looks up to his "uncle" like a surrogate father.

Nivola makes a splendid leading man, engaging and stylish when chewing the scene or dispensing mob justice. And there are traces of greater depth which elude most everyone else. In the contradictions between the scraps of decency and humanity he shows to some and the savage brutality he’s capable of, one can see a bit of James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano in Dickie. It's a pity the character only gets a movie's worth of screen time, because there's potential for story arcs which could enrich the show's mythology that are merely hinted at.

Sadly, the same can’t be said for the younger Gandolfini. He looks convincingly like a teenage Tony, but we barely get a glimpse of the complex and fascinating powerhouse of a character his late father played. Other returning characters amount to, at most, recurring cameos, and are utterly inconsequential across the board. Though to be fair to the cast, the lack of any coherent or compelling drama doesn't seem like their fault. Rather, it’s that the script seems intent on creating moments to make callbacks to the series, less so on expanding on any of the characters or telling a new story with them. An on-paper terrific cast (Jon Bernthal, Vera Farmiga, Corey Stoll, and Ray Liotta failing to make much of an impression in two roles) are wasted doing threadbare imitations of their TV counterparts and dropping obvious references and lines viewers remember (or if they're playing new characters, are reduced to mafia stock roles). It’s barely even lip service, let alone fan service.

With little of the show's great character drama to speak of, all that's left is a pretty basic mob action movie starring Dickie. And it's admittedly some fun in these moments, if pretty inconsequential (much like the violence on the show, which usually amounted to quick bloody skirmishes and was often resolved anticlimactically if at all). Nivola plays action antihero solidly, and Odom makes for a decent foil. This much upgrades the film from a pure disappointment to an okay popcorn flick, but it only amounts to very average and ordinary, things The Sopranos never was even in its handful of lesser episodes.