The Many Saints of Newark review – nothing tops The Sopranos

The television series, The Sopranos, had a somewhat quixotic relationship to cinema. True to the real-life fascination and love provoked by Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather series (even Russian gangsters as far afield as Kazan to the west of Moscow were said to have dressed like Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone and adopted his catchphrases), the Soprano “crew” spitball about their favourite scenes, do goofy impressions and compare their criminality to the types found in the films. 

It’s not hard to work out why gangsters loved the series – in Michael and Vito Corleone, the modern mob is painted in the colours of old-time Sicily. The Corleones are not so much ruthless criminals as representatives of an older, dying order when the mafia protected the ordinary labourer against the depredations of feudalism.

But there’s a catch. When the Soprano crew settle down in front of a freshly purloined DVD of The Godfather on the television, technical faults get in the way. “The disc is in there,” Tony Soprano’s nephew Christopher Moltisanti shouts in frustration at the empty screen. Meanwhile, Tony is asked by his capo Paulie Walnuts what his favourite scene is – he tells the crew that it’s when Michael returns to Sicily: “the crickets, the great old house.” (Interestingly, Tony’s preference appears to change over the course of the series – his son Anthony Junior says that his “favourite scene of all-time” is when Michael shoots a corrupt policeman out of revenge.)

Elsewhere in the series, the films are turned into pastiche – Paulie Walnuts’ car horn is The Godfather theme tune. Christopher Moltisanti refers to Luca Brazzi as Lewis Brazzi. Silvio Dante’s impression of Michael Corleone in Godfather 3 always gets a lot of laughs, but it’s objectively inaccurate. 

The show’s creator David Chase seems to say that The Godfather is part of the background chatter to the 21st-century mafia. But modern gangsters are too far downstream in culture and fashion to really bear comparison to the old models. To put it another way, James Gandolfini won plenty of Emmys for his performances as Tony Soprano; Marlon Brando was awarded an Oscar, although he did not accept it.

Well, now The Sopranos has made it onto the big screen in a prequel devised by David Chase and directed by Alan Taylor of Game Of Thrones. The Many Saints of Newark’s opening scenes take place during the Newark race riots of 1967, which grounds the film solidly in its era. But the film is more than just an “origins story” for Tony Soprano. 

Although Michael Gandolfini’s performance is an outstanding tribute to his late father and marks the emergence of a great new talent, Many Saints is first and foremost a portrait of the whole generation that shaped Tony’s assumptions and worldview.

The main character and focus for almost all of the dramatic tension is Dickie Moltisanti, Tony’s uncle, played in magnificent style by Alessandro Nivola. We see Tony first as a boy and then as a young man, experiencing at close quarters the violent and tight-knit world of the Italian-American mafia. 

Virtually all of Tony’s close relatives are portrayed as total maniacs. Young Tony grows up in a world of murder, vicious racism, domestic abuse and lots and lots of violence. At various points, I reflected with some irony that it was a marvel he turned out quite so well given the circumstances (“well” meaning here modestly well-adjusted some of the time).

There was plenty of stuff to chew over for die-hard Sopranos fans. In the television series, Dickie Moltisanti is clearly Tony’s hero – he often speaks of him with reverence, as a teacher who taught him everything and a friend whom he loved. Moltisanti’s son Christopher, who only knew him as a baby, is frequently gripped by anxiety that he is failing to live up to his father’s example.

But did the film work? I couldn’t fault the atmosphere, the acting of the main characters and the meticulous attention to detail – there wasn’t a discrepancy I could find with the references made to the era in the original series. But I found myself only really engaged with the stories of Dickie and Tony.

The rest of the ensemble felt like a series of flawed copies of their counterparts in the television series. Livia, Tony’s terrifying mother, played a good hand in a cameo role. But Uncle Junior, Paulie Walnuts and Silvio Dante had virtually no presence about them. 

But that’s both the luxury of television and the enduring beauty of all 80-something hours of the original series – every character is given greater and greater depth until the viewer feels intimately familiar with every aspect of the human comedy of New Jersey life.

In the cinema, we got snapshots – as if Tony’s flashbacks from the original series had been artfully stitched together.

Maybe nothing can top The Godfather, that’s true; but then, Many Saints couldn’t beat The Sopranos. Television is the real thing, after all. And nothing on TV can ever top The Sopranos.