The Ethos of James Gandolfini's Tony Soprano
Written by Andreas Babiolakis
It has been a decade since James Gandolfini passed away at the age of 51 after suffering a heart attack. There are many reasons why his death affected us greatly; we missed his talent tremendously; he left an impression on many of us through his performances; he seemed like a great person in his everyday life. Two additional reasons are connected to his iconic performance as the patriarchal mob boss Tony Soprano in HBO’s breakthrough series The Sopranos: he delivered one of the greatest performances in television history, and we were all waiting to see what was next in store for the actor the years after the series concluded. He had some parts big and small, but the posthumous releases of Enough Said and The Drop were starting to indicate what was to come: we would see a new side to the versatility of Gandolfini’s capabilities, and we’d also continue to see him play a tough guy like no one else can.
I’m likely not covering any new ground in saying that Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano is an untouchable character on television, but it’s important to revisit why he’s regarded as such. Many writers have attempted to recreate his antihero archetype without realizing the actual foundations of Gandolfini’s blueprint: many characters that followed in Tony Soprano’s footsteps were ostensible antiheroes and void of nuance, purpose, and texture as if they were written without a clue as to why Tony works so well. Flashback to 1999 when The Sopranos first debuted. Tony is already a bad person, and it’s not as if he is seeking retribution. He is just searching for normalcy and himself within his world of crime and chaos.
If anything, we first see him taking part in a therapy session with psychiatrist Jennifer Melfi after he has suffered a couple of panic attacks. Series creator David Chase brilliantly introduces the idea of psychoanalysis as a means of exposition and a conveyance to flashback to the younger years in Tony’s life: he cannot open up to anyone else, and it’s the one way that he can get through to us viewers at home. The Sopranos intercuts the actual events going on during Tony’s stories, and we can discern if he is being truthful to Jennifer or not (this in and of itself is also a telltale sign of how his character is). Gandolfini brings a vulnerability to Tony during these moments because. he has virtually no other opportunity to expel his inner demons. He is heavily tied to the mafia and works his way up within his organization (backing out or being a sitting duck would result in Tony being in danger). He is also a husband and father, but he doesn’t exactly have the best relationship with his intense wife Carmela, free spirit daughter Meadow, and blockheaded son A.J. (and let’s not even get into his mother Livia). Tony doesn’t make it any easier on himself with his adultery and deception.
So he opens up during his therapy sessions (and, simultaneously, to us viewers). Gandolfini doesn’t turn Tony into a sap, but he instead vies for a tenderness within a man who permanently feels the need to feel unapproachable and hardened. Here was the next gangster/crime television series, and we’re seeing a capo spilling the beans as much as he can. Not only that, but he reveals some of his own personality as well. Many crime-related stories think that misdeeds are the entirety of the characters that commit them. Sure, Tony unveils what he does on the regular, but then he starts talking about the ducks in his pool. Do we think any less of Tony and how scary he is as a gangster? Absolutely not. Instead, we gravitate towards this shred of love found deeply inside of a made man: a crack in his armour to his enemies, hope to his family, and a breath of fresh air to audiences worldwide. This wasn’t a run-of-the-mill mafioso bozo: this was a human being that happened to get wrapped up in this life.
Consider what this meant to Gandolfini additionally. Here’s an actor who was on the rise for several years and was getting confined to many tough-guy roles. He took the first opportunity to flesh out a tired mould. Right off the bat, you knew The Sopranos was going to be different before you even got a sense of the goings-on in the series and all of the other characters simply because Tony Soprano himself was different. He was as dangerous and frightening as any other criminal character that was worth a damn, but Gandolfini actually had you connecting with a terrible person. He was a capo, but he was also a dad, a son, a husband, a friend, a boss, an employee, and a tortured human being that needed to find out why he could no longer handle pressure (and, believe me, he deals with a lot of pressure in the series). Even someone that calls all of the shots in multiple scenarios needs advice once in a while. Tony Soprano was a complicated character you could identify with (or at least understand as a person, as if he was a neighbour that was just up the street). Chase planted this seed. Gandolfini watered it into an extraordinary plant with many boughs and twigs.
Looking back at the ducks, I can’t think of many sights on television that soothed my heart as much as Tony Soprano freely following the water foul friends in his pool with the most genuine grin on his face: this is paradise to a man that has death searching for him at every corner. The ducks living, birthing ducklings, and subsequently leaving has Tony staring at the cycle of life before his very eyes and unable to stop it. As he concludes in one of his preliminary sessions, he found purpose in these ducks and was to lose all of that once they would leave. His family isn’t like his ducks (hell, his family members don’t even care about the ducks when they settle in the Soprano pool). The mafia isn’t like his ducks either, particularly since Tony is forever having to worry about double-crossing and safety.
It’s not like Tony Soprano chases this fleeting sensation throughout the series either. Gandolfini ensures that the character festers in this inescapable purgatory of life and crime, but he always allows us to stroll within his mind (even when he isn’t in therapy). As The Sopranos continues, it’s as if we are now holding these conversations with Tony ourselves as he unfurls the latest issues in his life. He doesn’t even need to wink at the audience or spell things out. We’re already comfortable in the psyche of Tony Soprano because Gandolfini opened that portal from the very first scene we were ever graced with. Sure, it’s obvious that Tony Soprano is an iconic character, but part of that is because the character may have been blessed with (arguably) the greatest character introduction in television history. Gandolfini has Tony Soprano — a menacing mobster — eyeing around a shrink’s office not with nerves but with curiosity. We got to see a criminal actually have gears grinding in his head. We see him authentically chuckle over something amusing. We never lost sight of who Tony Soprano was underneath the layers of being a tempestuous family man, a selfish lover, and a ruthless criminal. Even if Gandolfini phoned his performance in for the rest of the series, we understood Tony Soprano through and through from the very start.
Gandolfini never slowed down though. He had character arcs, sure, but not in the kind of way that Walter White of Breaking Bad or Daniel Holden of Rectify do (a devolution into madness and evil with the former, and a cleansing of self and spirit with the latter). His character is a bit constant but he still undergoes several inner shifts, including his various relationships with family members (particularly Meadow Soprano) and his progressions within the mafia (and all of the criminal entanglements that follow). Tony as a person is the same as he ever was from whence we met him, and that’s thanks to Gandolfini’s commitment and consistency. In the same way that Tony is real because he is fleshed out and not a stereotype, Gandolfini ensured that the character is authentic because he lived and breathed without inner designs or synthetic motivations. He may change ever so slightly, but he’s always going to be Tony Soprano.
It’s incredibly difficult to pull off a performance this specific without feeling dull or monotonous, and that’s because Gandolfini prioritized Tony’s minor details and personal ticks over his on-paper description. We know that Tony is scary and Chase and his writing team provided us with many cases where Tony proves this. Gandolfini put his finishing details in other ways. In scenes where Tony is frightening, Gandolfini will inject a minuscule drop of panic or hurt into Tony’s yells depending on the context: this validates — in Tony’s mind — this behaviour because it comes from a reactionary response that Tony is tending to, whether he feels betrayed, infuriated, or fearful for his own life (or his family’s safety).
Gandolfini took the instructions on the script and turned in a performance of a lifetime. Part of the coldness one feels from the series finale’s abrupt ending is that final shot: an extreme close-up of Tony Soprano being caught off guard. Ignore all of the implications of this moment (whether or not Tony is getting killed or the series is inferring that life goes on whether we’re there to see it or not) and focus on the shot itself. It’s a statement that there may have been more to Tony that we have yet to be acquainted with, and The Sopranos rid us of this opportunity. If you believe this is the absolute end for Tony Soprano, then you recognize that you feel as though a terrible person has been snatched away from you: that’s the power of Gandolfini’s performance throughout the series.
We’ve seen bad people play bad people in films and television time and time again, but you just know that James Gandolfini was a saint in comparison. It’s nearly impossible for an actor to not glorify the sins of a sinful character that they’re portraying particularly because they have to embody said character. Somehow, Gandolfini did just that with Tony Soprano without ever watering down the character itself. He rendered him tangible: as if we learned about our neighbour’s shady second life on the news and can’t believe our eyes. Again, the effort to populate so many innocent details into Tony Soprano’s essence is what feels like a telltale sign to me: Gandolfini was forever being pigeonholed (either as an actor only capable of a single note in bit parts or as an actor that could only play tough guys). This role was Gandolfini’s opportunity to put the kibosh on both stigmas. Tony Soprano was a tough guy, but he also was so much more. Gandolfini was born to play lead parts, especially when so many actors followed suit in his innovations. I wish we could have seen even more from James Gandolfini post-Sopranos, but even just this one project is enough to tell me that the late star was a generational titan of acting. Many things on the small screen and in crime stories changed when James Gandolfini used a promising opportunity to his best advantage (whilst studying his screenplays beyond just the lines of dialogue) and that tells you one last point about him: he was a wise actor. I wish he was given more opportunities and time to teach us more.
Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Toronto Metropolitan University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.