The Countdown: The Third Best Sopranos Tangent Episode

3) Tony, Paulie and Christopher go to Italy (Season 2)

While this episode covers some other significant material – Big Pussy gets spotted with an FBI agent, Big Pussy’s wife contemplates divorce, Big Pussy kills an Elvis impersonator with a hammer – the bulk of the episode is concerned with Tony’s business trip to Naples with Paulie and Christopher.

The trip to Italy may be the most hilarious thing David Chase has ever written. As soon as a taxi drops them off at their hotel, Christopher points to Vesuvius and says, “I don’t care what anybody fucking says, I’m going to see that fucking mountain!” Soon thereafter, Chris meets an Italian mobster with a taste for heroine. Christopher doesn’t leave the hotel for the rest of the trip. After a multi-day bender of smack and slut, a hung-over Chris buys Adrianna something from the giftshop at the Naples airport.

Paulie steals the show. While talking up his desire to experience the authentic Italy, he quickly finds the old country is, well, just not new enough. Upon being served fettuccine with squid-ink sauce, he asks if they have any “macaroni and gravy.” Later in the meal he goes to the water closet. The stall is small and missing a toilet seat. He decides better of it. After the meal, he asks Tony to return to the hotel so he can go to the bathroom.

While exploring the streets of Naples the next day, he greets everyone with an enthusiastic “Commendatori!” An elderly man at the waterfront asks, “American?” Paulie says yes, and the man curses him out in Italian for the incident when a U.S. marine plane hit a cable-car at an Italian ski resort. Paulie, not knowing Italian, smiles and keeps walking. And when a local prostitute shows Paulie disinterested service, he asks, “Haven’t you heard of the saying the customer’s always right?”

Tony’s plot is more serious: he meets and flirts with the female mob boss who runs the Naples family because her father-in-law is senile and her husband is in jail. They have some interesting conversations about gender and power but the actress who plays the boss is just a little too beautiful and glamorous to be believable.

This episode demonstrates what appears to be the main purpose of the tangent episodes: comic relief. They’re like the drunken clowns in Shakespeare’s plays who seem so out of place to modern eyes. It’s Chase’s concession to the rabble. (Or maybe he’s just lazy and undisciplined. Or maybe, like Shakespeare, it will take 400 years and 200 dissertations to determine that Chris’s encounter with Massive Genius in Season 1 was the most brilliant thing Chase ever wrote.)

The Countdown: The Fourth Best Soprano Tangent Episode

4) When Tony meets his father’s gooma; Christopher hangs out with Tim Daly (Season 5)

The stuff with the gooma was fine, but the real meat in this episode was Christopher’s ill-fated friendship with J.T. Dolan (Tim Daly), a once-successful television screenwriter who bottomed out on drugs. After becoming each other’s sponsors in rehab, Chris lets Dolan in on a high-stakes poker game… and Dolan quickly trades in his drug addiction for an addiction to gambling.

After Dolan racks up a $57,000 debt, Chris beats the shit out of Dolan, who proceeds to lose writing assignments and return to heroine. After taking Dolan’s car as a partial down payment on the debts, Chris, ever the friend, suggests Dolan return to rehab.

The episode is fascinating, because like the Season 2 plot about Robert Patrick’s gambling addiction, it shows how these bastards live with themselves: they divide their lives completely into business and personal spheres. Under the rules of Christopher’s “business,” it’s perfectly reasonable to viciously attack a close friend for not repaying his debts. It’s also perfectly reasonable to switch back to friendship mode and give an old friend advice about how to fix his life. Good guy, that Christopher.

This episode uses Tim Daly to perfection. As an actor, I find him smug and unlikable (popular critical opinion notwithstanding), and he’s no different here. (The only exception was the TV show Wings, where he played a wooden good guy, and was as boring as John Corbett.) So how do you make a smug guy sympathetic? Pair him with a hardened criminal who beats the crap out of him and takes his car.

I always like these episodes where civilians get mixed up with the crew because it swiftly reminds you that Tony Soprano and his associates are very, very bad people, with ludicrous and hypocritical value systems.

Unlike some other mob shows and movies – like Miller’s Crossing or Scarface, for example – Chase and his writers don’t buy into the popular claptrap that there’s a moral equivalency between mobsters and civilians and cops. While civilians may be just as obnoxious, ignorant or self-involved as the criminals, they’re never evil. Tony Sopranos’ violence against others is not a metaphor for the psychological violence that man commits against man or anything like that; it’s just reprehensible, morally bankrupt violence.

The Countdown: Five Best — and Worst — Sopranos Tangent Episodes

In honor of the last two episodes of The Sopranos, both of which are part of the sometimes great, sometimes embarrassing tradition of Sopranos Tangent episodes, my next few posts will count down the five greatest Sopranos tangent episodes, as well as the five – or three, haven’t decided yet – worst Sopranos tangent episodes. Without any further ado, here’s Number Five of the Five Best:

5) The FBI-tapping episode (Season 3)

When Season 3 premiered, it was like Pedro Martinez taking the mound on opening day in 2001 against the Baltimore Orioles. How do you follow up two of the greatest seasons ever? Well, this episode, the first of the season, was like Pedro wiping his brow, facing down the batter, shaking off a sign… and throwing a ping-pong ball underhand.

Starting with a takeoff on the Peter Gunn/Spyhunter theme song, nearly the entire episode was concerned with the FBI’s sometimes ham-fisted attempts to bug The Sopranos household. While the whole thing went on way too long, the episode is interesting for showing the lengths the FBI is forced to go to get evidence on a known criminal, and also for adding an undertone of suspense into Tony’s criminal dealings at the house (an idea that was cut off at the knees when Meadow borrowed the bugged desklight for her dorm room, which illustrates one of my pet theories: Tony isn’t a brilliant criminal, he’s just ridiculously lucky. To be addressed in a future post…).

This ep also deserves points for cojones. It gave many of us our first hint that David Chase couldn’t give a flying crap what us fans think or expect. He’s got us by the balls and he knows it.

(Epilogue: Pedro pitched brilliantly in 2001 but was hit by an injury mid-season and ended up only pitching 117 innings. He was never quite the same pitcher again. The same could be said for The Sopranos. Like Pedro, The Sopranos’ best two seasons were in 1999 and 2000. Despite taking a downturn in 2001, both The Sopranos and Pedro started from such a ridiculously high level of achievement that they were still more often than not the best thing in baseball, or on TV. But both were on so infrequently – and when you did get to see them, they were both sometimes frustratingly mortal – that you couldn’t help but reminisce about the 1999 and 2000 seasons, and be thankful you saw some of the greatest pitching – and best TV – man has ever seen. Which leads me to a question: when does The Sopranos’ contract with HBO run out, and if it does, will David Chase have a public falling out with the network and take the show to Showtime, where the weaker competition will mask Chase’s declining skills for a few more years, and where the ratings-hungry execs will put up with his antics regardless how loony he gets? Isn’t Chase overdue for his midget mascot phase?)

Last night’s Sopranos (The Ben Kingsley episode)

How terrible was last night’s Sopranos? Let me count the ways:

1) Sleepwalking performance from Ben Kingsley. Truly painful to watch.

2) A numbingly obvious subplot about mobster’s interest in free loot for celebrities. Like Chris’s buddy, who’s in the business, wouldn’t know about it. Like Chris, who is obsessed with Hollywood, wouldn’t know about it.

3) Wilmer Valderamma.

4) Wilmer Valderamma.

5) Wilmer Valderamma.

6) Chris falling back on the wagon while on a vacation… again.

7) Artie confronting Tony and then breaking down in tears… again.

The hostess’s nonsensical confession. First she cries and tells the truth, then she tells Artie to fuck off and says that she and Bennie laugh at him? Huh?

9) A whole episode that has almost nothing to do with Tony, even in a tangential way. At least the “Gay Vito” episode gave us a picture of how the “new Tony” does business.

10) The final scene with the Italian hitmen, marveling over the cheap dollar. Cute, but pointless.

11) The “opening the books” dinner for a few reasons: a) Who the hell are these new guys? We’ve never seen them before. b) Why would Phil be at the dinner? Isn’t an entirely different family?

Here are the two redeeming features of the episode:

1) Lauren Bacall getting punched in the face. Great shock value.

2) Artie Bucco beating the shit out of Bennie. Score one for the regular people.

Dance, you fool!

I saw The Red Shoes last night. It’s one of those movies that movie buffs – scotch that, cineastes – rave about, and almost no one’s seen, like Satyajit Ray’s films (I’m 0-for-37). The Red Shoes has a number of marks going against it: it’s British, it has no recognizable stars and – wait for it – it’s about ballet.

I have nothing against ballet, I guess, but the only ballet I’ve ever been to was The Nutcracker when I was eight years old, and I would die happily if I never went to the ballet again. Its charms are simply inaccessible to me.

So I was surprised how much I enjoyed The Red Shoes. The first half or so has the familiar feel of well-made ‘40s and ‘50s films – efficient dialogue, well-defined action, great character actors. The best part is the leader of the ballet troupe, Boris Lermontov, played by Anton Walbrook, who’s a cross between Vincent Price and Kevin Kline playing Vincent Price. Sample exchange:

Lermontov: How would you define ballet, Lady Neston?

Lady Neston: Well, one might call it the poetry of motion perhaps, or…

Lermontov: One might. But for me it is a great deal more. For me it is a religion. And one doesn’t really care to see one’s religion practiced in an atmosphere… (meaningful pause) such as this.

(Cue diabolical laugh and twirl of the mustache. OK, I added the laugh part. But Lermontov does have a mustache that can best be described as “villainous.”)

As fun as Lermontov is – and he’s a lot of fun, especially when he wears a kimono and women’s sunglasses – the first part of the movie is fairly standard backstage drama: young aspiring dancers and musicians climb the ladder of success in the backstabbing, glamorous, exhausting, very gay world of professional ballet. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

+ ( / ) = ?

But the movie goes from moderately interesting to captivating when Lermontov’s troupe stages the ballet of the movie’s title. That’s surprising for reasons beyond the fact that I actually enjoyed watching ballet.

Typically, watching any kind of stage production recreated on film is an exasperating affair. Film emphasizes everything that is artificial about theater – exaggerated gestures, shouted line readings, the flimsiness of sets – without demonstrating what makes theater powerful: its physical immediacy, the companionship of the crowd, the power viewers have once they suspend their disbelief. That power allows us to see things that are not there: a helicopter, for example, when all we see or hear is canned rotor noise and an actor pointing to the rafters (unless you’re watching an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, in which case you actually get a helicopter, along with the sad spectacle of a stage musical that wishes it were a movie).

But directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger get around this problem, ingeniously, not by accepting the limitations of theater, but by accepting the limitations of film. They accept that film is terribly literal-minded, and leaves no room for the viewer to imagine what is not there. So what do they do? They film the ballet as it might be seen in the imagination of a spellbound viewer. Characters appear and disappear, sets miraculously transform, newspapers dance, turn into people and back into newspapers again. We get close-ups of faces, hands, feet. In its climax, we see the crowd as the lead dancer, Victoria Page (Moira Shearer), might envision them: a rumbling wave crashing on a rocky shore. It’s all quite surreal, and quite wonderful. It’s like the dream sequences in Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind: so bizarre and visually rich that it needs to be watched multiple times to enjoy – and understand – fully.

Once The Red Shoes is staged, the movie becomes more engaging, especially when Lermontov punches a mirror in anger. It also becomes quite thematically interesting, as it explores the question of whether happy people can create good art. On one side are Page and Julian Craster, a talented young composer (Marius Goring), who fall in love and seek to continue working for the ballet; on the other is Lermontov, who believes that “the doubtful comforts of human love” cannot co-exist with the highest level of artistic expression. The nice thing is that we’re never sure who’s right. As much as Lermontov is portrayed as the authority on, well, everything, we’re never certain if his disgust at Craster’s and Page’s relationship is because it makes shitty art, or because he’s simply jealous. Not of either them, really, but of normal people in general, who can find fulfillment in activities other than art. And who don’t require personal misery as the engine for ambition.

The movie doesn’t really answer its central question, ending with a nonsensical cop-out that looks suspiciously like a Hollywood-ized happy ending (although it’s not, because the film was entirely British-made). Page is driven mad by the conflict between love and art and leaps to her death in the film’s penultimate scene, although she doesn’t actually die; in fact, she survives, bloodily, cradled in Craster’s arms. There’s the suggestion – which is not made explicitly enough – that she survived but her legs are crippled, meaning she can now choose love without conflict because her dance career is over. But in a medium as literal-minded as film, a mere suggestion is not enough.

The movie would have been better-served by ending about a minute earlier, when Craster and Lermontov confront Page in her dressing room minutes before opening night and demand that she choose love or art. In the movie, Page, through tears, chooses art, and Craster leaves, while Lermontov grabs her wrist and tells her to get ready to go on stage. The camera closes in on Page’s overly-made up, kabuki-like face, and there’s a look of horror. Then it should have faded to black. It would have been wonderfully ironic: a young artist coming to the horrible realization that greatness and misery often go hand in hand.

If that’s too uncomfortably close to the sentimental American glorification of romantic love, then Powell and Pressburger should at least have had the balls to kill Page. It would have more elegantly demonstrated the impossibility of the art-life conflict, and shown that the co-existence of creation and procreation requires some sort of compromise.

Or better, perhaps, to have a mock-happy ending, with Craster accepting Page’s choice of art and joining the audience for the opening night. Once on stage, Page would mess up a move or two, but not care, because her love is in the audience. Lermontov, then, would be the one wearing a look of horror, and we wouldn’t know if it’s because the art has been ruined, his jealousy is un-satiated or simply because he’s an absolutist who can’t stomach compromise.

Thank you for Thank You For Smoking

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is the greatest film satire of all time (meaning it’s about half as good as the collected works of Trey Parker and Matt Stone). All satires that aspire to Dr. Strangelove’s level of greatness – if not South Park’s – must be judged by three criteria: the freshness of their targets, the fearlessness of their execution and the narrative resolve never to go soft. Satire is the sworn enemy of sentimentality.

So how does Thank You For Smoking stack up?

On the first criterion, it’s fresher than an ear of corn in Iowa. Over the last 15 years, and especially since the Big Tobacco settlements of the late ‘90s, smoking has become the great bogeyman of (liberal) American society. It’s banned in most public places in the West and Northeast. Its advertising is limited to magazines, NASCAR and promotions at bars where girls use ID-checking devices to make sure you’re 18 that are more sophisticated than what the bouncer uses to make sure you’re 21. And as Jeff Megall’s serene superagent (Rob Lowe) aptly notes in Thank You For Smoking, the only people left in movies who smoke are “RAVs”: Russians, Arabs and villains.

Antismoking hysteria has reached epidemic proportions: secondhand smoke is almost universally considered a killer, despite studies relying on the flimsiest of proof; any state legislature looking for a quick injection of revenue can raise taxes on cigarettes and nobody makes a stink; and antismoking commercials now spend less time emphasizing the health risks of smoking and more time demonizing cigarette companies for having the gall to sell, and god forbid, market, a legal product. The antismoking crusade has had nothing but love the last 10 years; it was due for a good hating.

I blame it all on C3PO catching R2D2 smoking a furtive fag in the bowels of the Death Star. Wouldn’t you need a cigarette if you spent everyday with a neurotic, repressed homosexual robot?

But perhaps the best measure of the audacity of the movie’s target – which is to say, the sanctity of its target – was my mid-50-something mother’s response to a trailer for the movie before a showing of Munich in December. With a look of disgust on her face, she asked, “Why are people laughing?

But picking an un-P.C. target is the easy part. How does Thank You For Smoking fare on criterion two, fearless execution?

One of the trickiest tasks facing all satires is the protagonist. If the premise of good satire is that everyone is hypocritical and corrupt, how do you concoct a hero that’s not hatable? Most satires take the easy way out, by choosing innocents, if not simpletons, as their heroes – think Forrest Gump, Being There’s Chauncy Gardiner, even South Park’s fourth graders. But Thank You For Smoking comes from the much rarer strain of satire (call it “The Bad Santa School”) where the protagonist is as vile as everyone else. In a world where everyone’s full of shit, we like Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart, in a role he was born to play) because at least he’s honest about being full of shit.

Indeed, as a lobbyist for Big Tobacco, Naylor beams about his B.S. He delights in turning familiar arguments on their head – he asks a Senate panel considering a sterner warning label for cigarette packs, “Why do we need a warning if everyone know it kills?” On a talk show with a 15-year-old cancer survivor, he wonders, “Why would cigarettes want to kill this boy? Wouldn’t we want him living as long as possible, and buying our products?” He is the ultimate devil’s advocate because, as a representative of an industry that kills half a million people a year, he nearly is the Devil’s advocate.

It looks like a Marlboro Red or Medium but I can’t be sure. I’d like to think he smokes American Spirits.

The film is clearly on his side; while we understand where Naylor’s coming from, his nemesis, Senator Ortolan K. Finistirre (William H. Macy, who has the strange and dopey look of a lifelong politician) is sanctimonious, humorless and cruel. Otherwise, the movie’s satire is wonderfully egalitarian. It mocks Big Tobacco’s junk science as readily as it ridicules antismoking advocates’ fear tactics (in the movie’s best visual gag, Finistirre suggests a warning label for cigarette packs featuring a skull and crossbones where the skull looks like the guy from Edwin Munch’s “The Scream” if he were wearing a hockey mask and bleeding from his neck). No sacred cow is left unburned – even cancer victims aren’t safe.

On the third criterion, toughness, the film slightly falters, but not in the most important ways. The one American institution that escapes the movie’s sights is the American family; Naylor is a devoted father to a wide-eyed son, and his ex-wife is a sympathetic, put-upon divorcé. While the son is intended to make us see the softer side of Naylor, and he’s a useful device in conversations where Naylor explains himself, I wished the kid were a tad more conniving. Whenever Naylor and his son are alone together in a scene, the movie goes maudlin.

But on the most important score, the ending, the movie doesn’t go soft. In lesser hands, the climactic Senate hearing where Naylor and Finistirre face off would devolve into a martyr-ish mess where Naylor finally admits that smoking kills and that he’s been wrong all along. But the climax’s brilliance is that it allows Naylor to be completely honest and completely audacious at the same time; when Finistirre asks Naylor what he will do when his son turns 18, Naylor hems and haws and finally says, “If he wants to smoke, I’ll buy him his first pack.” It’s a funny and sobering moment because it makes clear that in modern America, freedom of choice is as much under attack as smoking.

There is one glaring problem with the movie, however: nobody is ever seen lighting up. We know that Naylor smokes – he reaches for a pack while his son is napping on his lap, but the pack is empty. There are other characters, like Robert Duvall’s Captain, who surely must smoke, but we never see a character even finger an unlit cigarette.

I think I know why Jason Reitman, the co-writer and director, chose not to show anybody smoking. He probably figured it would be a tough enough sell to get viewers to sympathize with a tobacco lobbyist without seeing him smoke next to his sleeping son. But Reitman’s choice is a miscalculation; the kind of people who are going to see Thank You For Smoking already have a healthy skepticism of antismoking advocates. They’re ready to see the likes of Finistirre skewered and Naylor celebrated. Showing Naylor smoking would complicate their sympathies, but not eradicate them. (Besides, the kind of contrarians who are drawn to movies like Thank You For Smoking are often smokers themselves.)

Moreover, there are some missed comic opportunities by not showing smokers. Think of the nicotine-fiending New Yorkers who shiver in the cold for a cig while passersby avoid them like a drunk hobo. Or the way cigarette-smoking travelers are forced into unventilated glass rooms in airports so frequent flyers can shake their heads at these modern lepers. Indeed, if the movie had shown the way smokers are ghettoized from polite society, many viewers would have more sympathy for the film’s message, not less.

But despite some missteps, Thank You For Smoking gets all the big things right. That’s something to be thankful for.