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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
You don't have to be Italian for "The Sopranos" to hit home.
Jan 14, 2000 | "You can't break/The ties that bind" -- Bruce Springsteen
When we last saw New Jersey Mafioso Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), he and his wife Carmela (Edie Falco) and teenagers Meadow (Jamie Lynn Sigler) and A.J. (Robert Iler) were huddled around a table at the red-sauce Italian restaurant run by Tony's boyhood pal Artie (John Ventimiglia), taking refuge from a howling rainstorm and a power failure. In the candlelight, with thunder cracking and tree limbs groaning outside, Tony raised his glass of vino and proposed a toast to his family. "Someday soon, you're gonna have families of your own," he told his kids. "And if you're lucky, you'll remember the little moments like this, that were good."
That scene was an almost absurdly peaceful ending to the dark comedy-drama's explosively entertaining first season: Didn't the anxiety-riddled, Prozac-popping Tony just survive a hit suggested by his own mother (she was enraged at him for putting her in a "retirement community"), and wasn't he just barreling down the retirement home corridor, pillow in hand, intent on suffocating the mean-spirited old bat? (Instead, he found her surrounded by emergency medical personnel -- she'd suffered a stroke.)
But while the season-ending closeness of Tony and his immediate family may have been ironic (after all, he's a cheating husband who's also a murderer and a racketeer, Carmela is fed up with him and the kids are sullen manipulators), it was no illusion. Vendettas, grudges and betrayals come with the territory of family, but Tony's right, you have to remember the good times. The Sopranos are no more dysfunctional than any other upper-middle-class suburban brood, and in one enviable way, they may be less dysfunctional -- at least this family sits down to eat dinner together every night. And that goes for Tony's work family too; Tony and Paulie and Pussy and Silvio may bicker and squabble, but when the capicolla and the salsicce come out, that time is sacred. If we learned one thing from the first season of "The Sopranos," it's this: A family is a family, whether you're born into it or you take an oath to join it. And nobody gets out of a family alive.
In the much anticipated second season of "The Sopranos" (which opens Jan. 16 on HBO), the show's main concern is still family ties and the secrets that cement them: the secrets parents keep from children, children keep from parents, spouses keep from spouses, friends keep from friends, families keep from the community, mobsters keep from rivals. For the uninitiated, the two most potentially lethal secrets at the heart of the show are Tony's visits to a psychiatrist for his panic attacks (old-school Mafiosos consider talking to a shrink a betrayal of family business), and the mode of oral sex favored by Tony's uncle Corrado "Junior" Soprano (Dominic Chianese), which is considered a sign of male weakness in mob culture and which Tony teased him mercilessly and recklessly about when Junior's girlfriend let it slip. "Cunnilingus and psychiatry brought us to this," Tony mused philosophically as last season neared its climax of family/Family vengeance and wounded tough-guy pride.
Much of Tony's world involves saving face, preserving the outward appearance of power and manliness. And he labors so hard at it that you can't help but sympathize with and root for him. Yeah, he's a killer, but he's got midlife agita anyone can relate to -- he's growing apart from his wife, he's feeling middle-manager job pressures, he's sandwiched between caring for his difficult elderly mother and providing for his college-bound teens. Here is a man whose professional and personal lives are bound by the omert`, the code of silence, and he's in psychotherapy, for cryin' out loud, where there are no secrets. What a delectably wry fix "Sopranos" creator David Chase has dreamed up for his hero.
As fans know, most of Tony's problems, psychological and otherwise, trace back to his overly dramatic, poisonously joyless mother, Livia (Nancy Marchand). In a neat twist on the usual patriarchal Mafia stories, "The Sopranos" is about the sins of the mother visited on the son; the show has a deep understanding of the towering psychological power mothers wield over their children. As the second season opens, Livia is still in the hospital going through rehab, although her "stroke" was psychosomatic, brought on by "repressed rage" at Tony surviving the hit. (In an unsettling mingling of art and life, Marchand herself is fighting lung cancer and chronic pulmonary disease, so when you see Livia with oxygen tubes up her nose, you wonder if they're props or the real thing.)
But even in her weakened, addled state, Livia still looms larger than life in Tony's psyche. "She's dead to me," Tony announces about a half-dozen times in the first three episodes of the new season, and the way he dwells on it tells you that she isn't and can never be. But that's the bitch about families: To paraphrase Steve Van Zandt's Pacino-wannabe Silvio, just when you think you're out, they pull you back in.
