Monday, June 11, 2007

Sopranos [Warning: Spoilers]   [Jonah Goldberg]

Sorry, I just thought it was a bust. David Chase has rightly earned enormous — gigantic! — good will from his audience, but at times he simply abuses the trust. I thought the ending was a meta-ending cop out. The whole world wants to know how it's going to end, so Chase shoots a bunch of endings, doesn't use any of 'em and instead leaves the audience with a heightened sense of anticipation and then...nothing. I'm sure the cut-to-black thing will be remembered as an incredibly clever F-You to the grasping bourgeoisie by film school seminarians for generations to come. But at the end of the day, the show's supposed to be entertaining, no? And, while it had its moments, the finale ultimately failed on that test. Yes, that last scene was brilliant in how it developed a sense of tension and communicated how Tony might spend the rest of his life worried about the next threat, the next hitter, always looking over his proverbial shoulder. But it was, in my book, a silly way to end the series. It smelled like a cop-out for someone who couldn't take the pressure of coming up with a good ending. In fact, did anyone else notice that when he walked into the diner it was almost as if he was having a premonition of what was to come, like he was looking at himself? That's the sort of visual "out" you'd expect from a season finale, not a series-ender (unless of course this Sopranos movie talk is real). And, yes, I understand that Tony probably got whacked. There was foreshadowing of this in the episode with Bobby at the lake and the flashback in the second to the last episode. The show was all about Tony — whose egocentrism was the central idea of the Sopranos — and so the whole world ended when he got the bullet.

The whole show had continuity problems and felt like it couldn't figure out what it was about. Why would the New York crew suddenly decide things had gotten out of control? The Sopranos were on the ropes, their management in tatters, their "clients" paying off New York instead of them, and Tony was on the brink of indictment. Why would New York suddenly think Phil Leotardo's intransigence is the problem? AJ's search-for-meaning (am I a terrorist? A Bush hater? A war lover? a soldier? what?) was interesting but should have been a mid-season subplot, at best. I did like how Meadow has become an identity politics shmuck because she saw her father being arrested by the FBI so much. A mob princess manages to delude herself that Italian Americans are being persecuted because her sociopath-don of a Godfather was arrested a lot. The look on Tony's face when she said that was perfect. So again, I think there was a lot of interesting stuff in the finale, but I expected better than that from Chase & Co.

06/11 09:21 AMShare