Thursday, August 07, 2003
Tony Soprano, battler?
Originally published in The Age Green Guide, Thursday August 7 2003.
If we’ve learned anything from three and a half seasons of The Sopranos, it is that Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) is a bad man. He cheats on his wife, Carmela (Edie Falco). He cheats on his girlfriends. And we know for sure that he cheats on his taxes.
He’s tried to smother his dying mother with a pillow, he’s had his daughter’s ex-boyfriend whacked, and he would rather spend the night with his crew at ‘Bada Bing’, their strip-club hangout, than go home to his wife and family.
Tony is violent. He near-strangles his short-term mistress (or goomah) because she throws a steak at him; he mercilessly whips his local member of parliament because he dared to court Tony’s ex-girlfriend; and when a ‘business associate’ won’t play ball, Tony takes a pair of bolt cutters to his… er… well, let’s just leave it at that. And he does all of this in leisure-wear that if it isn’t already illegal, certainly should be.
It’s very easy to condemn Tony as little more than a brutal Mafioso, but a look beyond the obvious nastiness of his world reveals a man struggling with familiar dilemmas. Marital disagreements, stress at work, moody teenagers. These are not Mafia problems; these are human problems. And they are part of the reason why The Sopranos consistently finds resonance with its audience. Because Tony Soprano, New Jersey mob boss, husband, and father of two, might just be the contemporary everyman.
For example, Tony is under massive stress at work. Not only does he struggle with the day to day details of running a successful (if illegal) business, he has to deal with the constant spectre of the FBI, searching for that one piece of evidence in the chain that will see Tony behind bars. He has trouble finding good, reliable staff. And even when he does, they are liable to turn on him under governmental pressure, a betrayal that used to be unthinkable.
This shift away from ‘old school’ Mafia values almost proves fatal when one of Tony’s captains and best friends, Salvatore ‘Big Pussy’ Bompensiero (Vincent Pastore) nearly sinks the Soprano family by turning government informant rather than take his jail time. Tony is right: ‘these days, nobody has any room for the penal experience’. Admittedly, the decision to kill a disloyal employee is not an option usually contemplated in the non-Mafia world, but stress at work? That’s something that everyone can relate to.
The Sopranos have a lot of money. And it’s everywhere: in the roof, the basement, the backyard. For her own safety, Tony’s long-suffering wife Carmela has no control whatsoever over the family finances; she doesn’t know where the money comes from, where it goes, or even how much of it there is. However, she is concerned for her family’s financial future, and is not satisfied with Tony’s vague assurance that, should anything unfortunate happen to him, she’ll be ‘taken care of’.
Carmela’s way of dealing with this is to take close to $40,000 from one of Tony’s many hiding places and invest it on the sly, carefully ensuring that the IRS know nothing of the transactions. She’s a smart one, Carmela, and determined. Which is just as well, because along with their financial disputes, Tony and Carmela have two headstrong teenagers to raise: Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) and Anthony Jr (Robert Iler). And so they fight. All the time. About money and how best to discipline their kids. Sound familiar?
But Tony tries. He is in therapy every week and though he occasionally goes backwards, for the most part he improves. With the help of psychiatrist Dr Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco), Tony slowly uncovers what it is he is supposed to do. The hard thing is actually doing it. Tony knows that he is meant to look after his family, to forgive his employees when they make mistakes, and to keep his temper under control.
And it is to Tony’s credit that when he fails, he recognises it, and does his best to make amends. He buys Carmela a present (she may be smart, but jewellery is her weakness), he makes ice-cream sundaes with Anthony Jr, he goes to visit daughter Meadow in her dorm, he has his crew over for a barbecue. And he feels better for it. Though the line between good and evil is often blurred in The Sopranos, there is no doubt that Tony knows where it is – roughly, at least.
In fact, if it wasn’t for the strippers, the guns, the gambling, the drugs, the real estate scams, the unions, the loan-sharking, the baseball bats, the stockmarket rigging, the attempted matricide, the cash hidden in the garden, the murders, and the federal government investigation; you could almost be forgiven for thinking that Tony Soprano was just another battler.