A short column in The New Republic by Leon Wieseltier, titled Addio:
The New Republic
Addio
Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic Published: Monday, June 18, 2007
Really, the most that can be said of a great film is not that it is like a great book. Film is its own literature; and whereas I understand the comparisons of The Sopranos to the masterpieces of the realist novel, and I myself have not been immune to the hyperbolic impulse in praising this magnificent enterprise, it strikes me that the achievement of The Sopranos is not so much that it puts you in mind of Balzac or Dickens , but that here on television, for most of a decade, were tales that could stand in the company of Fassbinder , and Kieslowski, and Mike Leigh, and Chabrol . The subtle ramifications of plot and character; the absence of vulgarity (I mean vulgarity in the bad sense) from this painstaking investigation of the most vulgar people on earth; the close braiding of comedy and tragedy, so that neither optimism nor pessimism is ever the last word; the unrelenting maturity of attention that it demands of its viewers: the thing is so good it is almost not American. The Sopranos stands as a lasting chastisement of its medium, in that it accomplishes what American television most abhors: an improvement, by means of art, of the American sense of reality. In America, there is no higher service.
Consider only the language. Or more precisely, compare David Chase's dialogue to Aaron Sorkin 's dialogue. In Sorkin's shiny nonsense, people speak in repartee, and always find the words they need, and nothing insignificant, nothing tedious, is ever uttered. They talk as nattily as they look. Even their afflictions are oddly high-spirited, as coolness conquers all. There is not an unmordant or unmoralized second in anybody's day. Sorkin's phony people go from portentousness to hipness and back. They are the figments of a disastrously glamorous imagination, the polished puppets of a shallow man's notion of profundity. In The Sopranos by contrast,there is no eloquence, even when there is beauty. Silences abound.These people speak the way people actually speak: they lie, and lie again; they hide; they repair gladly to banalities, and to borrowed words; they struggle for adequacy in communication; they say nothing at all. Their verbal resources are cruelly lacking for their spiritual needs. They cannot say what they mean, or they do not know what they mean. Their obscenities are their tribute to the power of their feelings: the diction of their desperation. When they reach for sophistication, they mangle it. Their metaphors are awkward and homely, as in Tony's climactic soliloquy in his therapist's office about getting off, and staying off, the bus. Yet all this inarticulateness is peculiarly lyrical, and deeply moving.It is also a relief from the talkativeness that passes for thought in fancier places. Words should be fought for.
The hobbled and true language of Chase's people is an essential element of his devastating portrait of the dictatorship of ordinary life, of the alternately quickening and deadening influences of the commonplace. (So, too, is his exegetical use of popular music, whose salving effect has never been made clearer. I speak as one who is also inwardly fortified by "Denise" and "Oh Girl," and lifted up by "The Dolphins." And I can almost not forgive the show for leaving me so absurdly affected by "Con Te Partiro.") The Sopranos is a searching study of the problem of small horizons. The problem is that they are beautiful and they are crushing. Who does not come from a place that mistakes itself for the universe? All metaphysics is local. If it is possible to have a vision of the Virgin Mary, then it is possible to have a vision of the Virgin Mary at the Bada Bing. The Sopranos locates the human lot in north Jersey, but the human lot is available everywhere or it is available nowhere. And the gangl and Gemeinschaft provides the same satisfactions as any Gemeinschaft. (And the same hilarity. Meadow:"The state can crush the individual." Tony: "New Jersey?") Yet it provides also the same airlessness: the authenticity of these made communitarians does not exactly leave an impression of radiance. The bitter joke of the show is that these people are repulsive not only for their baseness but also for their provincialism. There is no Archimedes point outside the new Avellino . These are peasants with latte machines. Their insularity, their superstition, their immutability, their self-love: these, too, are human failures, like evil.
Chase and his writers are rightly fascinated by this carnival of infinitudes, and the old name for this fascination is humanism. The Sopranos allows for judgments, but not for simple ones. The only innocent in the show that I remember (who can forget her?) is Tracee, the young, unsiliconed, and doomed stripper; and the only pure villain, beside whom even that cocksucker Leotardo looks complicated, is Livia Soprano, the demon-mother who sets the saga in motion but is its least explored figure. Otherwise there are no heroes and no villains: there are good people who sometimes do bad things and bad people who sometimes do good things. Everybody loves, everybody hates; everybody has something to lose; everybody has reasons, everybody has wounds. Chase brilliantly captures the mystery of human motivation, the way in which human action is multiply determined, even antithetically determined, by strengths and by weaknesses, which cannot ever be disentangled. (Gloria Trillo, the bipolarity babe, is martyred to this complexity.) In this way he forces you into long spells of sympathy for morons and murderers. His view is dark, but it is not black. Carmela is right to aspire to more and better love, even if Madame Bovary is a lovely thing to have in a den. Don't stop believing. It is true that every trust that Chase depicts is drawn into the Soprano corruption -- cops, therapists, priests, doctors, lawyers, officials, teachers, writers, and above all wives -- but corruption,too, interests him as a human expression. Chase never relieves his people of their responsibility for all this physical and emotional violence: even as he inquires into the experience of depression, he laughs at the alibis of psychology. And in the end he wisely insists upon the invincible on-goingness, the eternal suchness, of the life that was chosen. The door of the diner opens and closes, opens and closes, admitting joy or danger. Now that the show is over, sadness accrues. I console myself with the knowledge that I will never see Janice Soprano again.
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