THE SOPRANOS:
“CHASING IT”/ “Walk like a man”
HBO
THE NATIONAL POST

Anthony Jr. can save or shatter his patriarch

The latest-but-one episode of The Sopranos chased me around Europe for a week, never quite catching up in time for me to write about it. So, here is a combined view of both that instalment and its successor: Episodes 4 and 5 of the current and final series. This at least reduces my danger of revealing sensitive information and having to enter the Critics' Protection Program.

As it happens, these two episodes fit very snugly together. They both explore the basic Sopranos theme of fathers and children, and especially of fathers and sons. I've often felt that the most important relationship in the show is the one between Tony and Anthony Junior. He's always wanted to keep A.J. out of the mob, for which, in any case, the kid has little talent. But Tony's hopes that A.J. might avoid it by emulating the academic success of his sister Meadow have been consistently and conclusively dashed. So, Tony makes fleeting, self-conscious contact whenever he can; memories still linger from the first season of father showing son how to change a tire ("We do it ourselves in this house") or the two of them sharing a furtive dish of ice cream.

One thing that A.J. inherited from his dad was a proneness to panic attacks. It was this that forced his parents a couple of years ago to abandon their plans to pack him off to a military academy. (He was far from willing, anyway: "I look like a dork," he said, surveying himself in his uniform.) There was a ghastly echo of this incident last week in the story of young Vito, son of the gay gangster who got bumped off in the previous season. That story seemed drawn out at the time, but it's justified itself in the sequel. Young Vito (did his parents call him V.J.?), unnervingly Goth, is acting up violently, and his mother appeals for help to the two ganglords on whom she has a claim: Phil Leotardo, her cousin, and Tony, her husband's old boss. Tony is the more sympathetic of the two when attempting a man-to-man talk - Phil being Phil, it's hardly a contest - but he doesn't actually get anywhere with his old friend's son. Half the time, young Vito points out, Tony has called him young Carlo. As usual, the strands here are drawn very tight: Carlo is the guy who replaced Vito on the mob's construction scam, and Tony often laments that he isn't nearly as good an earner. "Maybe," he tells Carlo, with a characteristic blend of tolerance and brutality, "you should try [fellatio]". And it's with a similar mix of cynicism and conscientiousness that Tony disposes of the young Vito problem; he won't pony up the $100,000 needed for the family to move to Maine ("you can't," he says, "have a geographical solution to a psychological problem"), but he will contribute $18,000 to have the boy removed to a camp in Idaho, where corporal punishment is not only allowed but, it seems, encouraged. It's a far nastier place than Tony once had in mind for his own son. And there's no reprieve as there was for A.J.; Vito Junior is virtually kidnapped, screaming, in the middle of the night.

This may be the worst thing Tony's ever done. Even here, though, it's possible to construct a kind of defence for him. He intended to pay for the Maine move out of his gambling winnings, only there weren't any. Tony's gaming compulsion has been abruptly introduced this season but it fits who and what he is. It's now cost him another in his diminishing line of old friends: Hesh, the Jewish financier, to whom he paid off a $300,000 loan at the end of Episode 4, accompanied by sheepish expressions of sympathy over the death of Hesh's girlfriend, the apparent victim of a heart attack. Tony used to be proud of having a Jew in his inner circle, but that kind of thing can turn on a dime. In debt and resenting it, Tony says things like "don't be shy, Shylock" while Hesh, who didn't dare not make the loan, has his own unflattering remarks about unpredictable Italians. And, on the subject of race, the Sopranos didn't seem too thrilled about A.J. having gotten himself a Hispanic fiancée.

The story of this engagement was spread over the two episodes. In 4, the barely adult A.J. proposed, was accepted, and then rejected. It was his best chance at escape, and 5 showed a depressed, regressing A.J., sprawled across his parents' couch, watching Tom and Jerry. Robert Iler's performance has been trashed over the years, but I've always found him convincingly insecure, not least in the tentative beard he's grown as a stab at maturity. Meadow, showing unusual concern, thought him suicidal. (And we remembered that the one time A.J. showed any interest in school is when he discovered doubt and existentialism). Irony of ironies: When Tony pushes him out of the house to hang with people his own age, they turn out to be junior gangsters from college, the student sons of Tony's lieutenants. The fathers are immensely proud of their offspring's scholastic achievements, even while the offspring are developing their own line in violence and extortion. (One of them is young Carlo who, when we meet him, doesn't seem in the least like young Vito.) A.J. seems to dig it; he's on track to become part of the world his father wanted to keep him out of.

James Gandolfini has seldom been more moving than in Tony's latest consultation with Dr. Melfi, recalling how, when your children are ill, you long to change places with them and take their pain; as always he makes you aware both of the reality of the feelings and of the sinister limitations of the space in which they operate. Keeping A.J. happy and uninvolved would, I think, be Tony's idea of salvation, and it looks like he isn't going to get it.

Conversely he wants to keep Christopher, his nephew and effectively his other son, very much involved, and that too is backfiring. Tony has come, after an initial burst of pride, to resent Chris's movie-making and he can't resist mocking Chris - who's in Alcoholics Anonymous - both for his attempts to stay on the wagon and for his periodic falls off it. The others laugh at a man who doesn't drink but it's Tony, the intelligent, who really knows how to twist the knife.

Episode 5 continued Chris's feud with Paulie Walnuts, his rival as loosest cannon in the arsenal who, in one scene, drives his car all over Chris's expensive garden: definitely bringing the fight home to your enemy. Later, Paulie tramples on even more sacred ground by prophesying a future for Chris's daughter as a stripper in the Bada Bing. Goaded beyond endurance, Chris shoots - but he shoots somebody else, a comparative innocent. The motives for this, the week's statutory whack, are mixed, but the victim may have sealed his own fate by uttering the word "Mafia," the first time it's been spoken, to my recollection, since the famous “Meadowlands” episode in which Tony's daughter asked him if he was a member. Tony's blustering reply was that there was no such thing as the Mafia; It was merely "an ugly stereotype."

That wheel, too, came full circle in Episode 5 when Tony denounced Chris' movie as "a very unflattering picture of Italian-Americans." The same allegation has of course been made of The Sopranos itself. The show's complexity is its best defence; second-best, perhaps, is this reminder (it's actually a running gag) that Tony agrees with his detractors, and that the show itself is way ahead of them.