Shadows Searching: THE MANY SAINTS OF NEWARK

In 2007, David Chase’s classic New Jersey mobster drama The Sopranos left us with a last supper. Now, it returns to us with The Many Saints of Newark, a prequel. It’s nothing if not consistent—a sprawling story deeply engaged with struggles of masculinity, family, moral weight, and the agonizing dissatisfying guilt the comes from a lifetime of sin. It’s religious and contemplative, torn between atonement and destruction, the holy and profane. That it’s also a multi-generational story of America in decline, a sad pack of boomers chasing the glory of their fathers and leaving less and less opportunity or exit strategy to their children, makes it uniquely suited to chronicle its moment and prefigure ours. But it’s also, at its core, and perhaps at its most appealing, a series about a husband, a wife, their children, and extended family connections; it’s the domestic dramas set up as counterpoint and intersection with the gangster plot lines that are the glue that holds the audience’s affection together. A viewer invested in them as a family, and the accumulation of character detail and thematic concerns consistently streamed forth from that font. A reason why the sudden cut to black in the series’ final episode is so shocking—still a jolt, a chill—is that it not only amplifies the ambiguity long embedded in the show’s philosophical concerns, but denies us closure on the people who, however deeply imperfect and morally compromised, have a humanity we learned to care about. Cold comfort it may be to know the cut to black is headed for us all no matter what we do. But it’s good to know life goes on and on and on and on until then, and for others after.

I like that Chase maintains the mystery of that moment, to the extent that any continuation of the Soprano family story simply had to go back in time. For a family, and a business, to concerns with legacy and lineage, it’s still a rich vein to mine. It feels haunted by future events, an inevitability that what’s set in motion here will reverberate down through the generations. There’s preordained tragedy in the mob life, a foreshortening of life and opportunity when the family and The Family are inextricable, petty crime and petty slights in the same terrible chain of cause and effect. Many Saints finds its main character in Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola), a father and uncle whose absence, having long been whacked when Sopranos began, shaped some of his descendant’s actions and perspectives. Here he’s still in the prime of his life. It’s the late 60s. (Chase’s other major feature film effort, 2012’s Not Fade Away, sets its tender musical coming-of-age story against the time’s cultural upheaval.) In this new film Newark is burning. Gangsters are scheming. The world seems to be coming apart, and for the members of the interconnected Jersey crime families their underworld black market power is the thing that gives their lives structure and some sense of control. You can see why a young Tony Soprano (here played by the late, great James Gandolfini’s son Michael in a finely tuned performance) would think this time was a golden age of sorts, although the deaths and prison sentences might make one think it’s no better than his own.

This anxiety of influence as it relates to generations cycles of dysfunction and distress animates Chase’s screenplay, co-written by Lawrence Konner and directed by Alan Taylor, series' vets both. It becomes a movie about people who almost know the way to do the right thing, but, mirroring the show’s Zeno’s paradox of morality, never can get there. Here it’s Dickie, who clashes with family and rivals, gets entangled in affairs and crimes alike, and who ultimately presents himself so slickly that the more impressionable around him might see in him a reason to perpetuate what is the cause of both the family’s wealth and its doom. That Dickie is given an almost literal angel and devil dispensing advice, in the form of a father and his twin brother (in a well-differentiated dual role for Ray Liotta) emphasizes the weight of his choices, and two potential futures. (That the whole movie is narrated from beyond the grave by another character related to him—the thing literally starts floating over gravestones where we overhear ghostly monologues—gives the project that extra weight of funereal fate.) Around him is a cavalcade of character actors playing younger versions of the old guard who haunted Tony’s adulthood: his intimidating father (Jon Bernthal) and snapping mother (Vera Farmiga), his bald bespectacled—and dangerous—Uncle Junior (Corey Stoll), and young up-and-coming gangsters like Paulie (Billy Magnussen) and Silvio (John Magaro). The extra-textual sense of winking inevitability is sometimes a nudge to the fans, but is also often adds to the overarching doom that settles around the ice-blue images and the sturdy mid-century design.

The movie is a relatively brisk two hours, but rambles and expands and never quite digs in to its shuffling surfaces. There’s something uneven—at once too much and too little—about its design, tracing a standard gangster set of concerns with hits and schemes and twists, against a larger family tapestry. It slips through time a bit, and finds pockets of characterization in which to get turned around. Without the space of a season of television, the scenes of sly humor and dark juxtapositions, simple philosophizing and earnest psychologizing, take up inordinate space. Though the movie leans on its Sopranos prequel status in ways that make this particular picture sometimes incomplete, there’s something alive in its ungainly design, especially as Chase introduces Leslie Odom, Jr. as a Black associate of the mobsters. He has his own through line that criss-crosses the other plots, and serves as intriguing counterpoint and counterbalance to their privilege, as well as valuable historical context. One scene finds a hit carried out in an army recruitment center where the flummoxed solider behind the desk yelps that Vietnam’s not his fault. Another has a white man drive a car with a dead body in the passenger seat through a line of riot cops too busy pointing artillery at protestors to notice. These ideas of whose behavior is policed, and who is allowed to get away with what, is emphasized and mirrored by the story of an innocent Italian immigrant (Michela De Rossi) who is brought into the Moltisanti family and becomes part of the mob lifestyle (with all the danger that entails) even as she dutifully takes classes to improve her English and assimilate. Even here there’s a sense that the events—moments of grace, and moments of betrayal—will continue to haunt the family, casting a long shadow.

Games People Play: GAME NIGHT

Game Night is comedy played fast and tight, an action thriller paced like a farce and overflowing with choice one-liners and witty banter. It’s a hoot. My favorite running joke involves various characters over the course of one-crazy-night falling into surprisingly sturdy glass tables. There’s such a satisfyingly goofy thunk as a body goes bouncing off where every other movie would give us a pleasing shattering smash. The action around this funny thread – just one of many, and besides the movie is so fast-paced all the jokes could count as running jokes – involves a group of friends whose weekly get-together goes very, very wrong. A competitive husband and wife (Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams) find their game night (pals played by Billy Magnussen, Sharon Horgan, Lamorne Morris, and Kylie Bunbury) invited to a murder mystery night by his rich, arrogant brother (Kyle Chandler). But, on the night in question, before the man can even explain all the rules past the ominous “it will look real,” actual criminals barge in, beat him up, and kidnap him. Now the group jets off on what they think is a scavenger hunt to find where a group of actors have taken him, but are instead pulled deeper and deeper into a black market conspiracy where the guns, blood, cops, criminals, car chases, and stolen goods are all-too real. 

Directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein (helming a superior project to their Vacation) take seriously the goofy script by Mark Perez (The Country Bears, improbably enough). Watch with the sound off and you might convince yourself you’re watching a Fincher knockoff. The shots are crisp, the violence bruises, and the lighting is dramatic shadows and rain-slick streets. But then there is the rapid-fire patter of bickering friends, treating it with all the tension and drama that’d be a little exaggerated were it a game of Monopoly or Trivial Pursuit, but is dramatically underplayed given the life-and-death situation of which they’re barely aware. Gradually, as they realize how in-over-their-heads they really are, the comedy is in the sudden scared flailing they have to keep in check in order to survive the night. That they’re also still so competitive that they can’t help but continue sniping little digs at one another is a fine touch. Beyond the high-energy excitement and the high-spirited joke-a-minute dialogue shot through with visual wit and whimsy – game board tilt-shift establishing shots; composited one-take mad-dash chases – the movie finds itself smartly rooted in the genuine affection of its participants. No matter how harried and dangerous the proceedings become, Bateman and McAdams are allowed to keep the suspense entirely out of their relationship. They’re a close-knit pair, clearly in love, adorably competitive with one another in a way that shows them to be enjoying playing the games because they actually like each other. The same extends to the friend group itself, which might get at each other’s throats, but never more than any gathering around the Sorry board. Even when a thug gets bloodily killed, there’s a nod to the stakes without skipping a laugh. This is big, broad, studio comedy-making operating at a consistently entertaining high.