Skip to main content

Why James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano Is “the Greatest Acting Achievement Ever Committed to the Screen”: A Video Essay

The ongoing "golden age" of prestige television drama began more than twenty years ago, but how many shows have truly surpassed The Sopranos, the one that started it all? However many series come and go, raising large and often obsessive fan bases with their varying mixtures of crime, history, politics, science fiction, fantasy, and intrigue, none have shown the cultural staying power of this six-season tale of a mob boss in turn-of-the-21st-century New Jersey. That The Sopranos remains relevant owes in part to the vision of creator David Chase as well as to the tour de force performance of star James Gandolfini.

Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, has stronger words of approbation: Gandolfini's is "probably the greatest acting achievement ever committed to the screen, small or big." In the video essay "How James Gandolfini Navigates Emotion" he marshals in support of this claim just one scene, but a scene that features Gandolfini at the height of his dramatic powers.

Taken from the fifth-season episode "Unidentified Black Males," originally aired in 2004 (and co-written by Matthew Weiner, later to create the prestige-TV franchise Mad Men), this selection takes place in the office of Tony's psychiatrist Dr. Jennifer Melfi, played by Lorraine Bracco. (When The Sopranos debuted, two months before the premiere of Harold Ramis' Analyze This, a mobster in therapy was very much a novel idea.)

"Tony Soprano is going to have a panic attack in this therapy session," says Puschak, and "the way James Gandolfini builds to that attack" demonstrates "how he carries us with him through a complex sequence of emotions." Here Gandolfini rises to the formidable challenge of lying convincingly: not convincingly in the sense that Dr. Melfi believes him, but convincingly in the sense that we believe the grapple with conflicting truths and untruths that characterizes Tony's life. Tony must pin his recent spate of panic attacks on something other than his cousin Tony B, who committed a hit he shouldn't have. That Tony doesn't quite believe his own words Gandolfini transmits with "his tone, his eyes, and the tilt of his head." He uses the musicality of Tony's speech, "some combination of leftover Italian rhythms and a New York-inflected North Jersey accent," to build to "larger and larger crescendoes."

As it foreshadows the approaching emotional turmoil, his "rhythmic anger, like waves crashing on the shore, is hypnotic, drawing you deeper into his mental and emotional space with each new cycle." Tony then doubles down on his lie, trying to cover for his cousin by inventing on the spot a story about having been beaten up by a gang of shoe thieves in 1986. Only later in the scene does the truth come out, or at least partially leak out, even as Gandolfini portrays Tony struggling to fight back the panic attack that has emerged as a result of telling these stories. For all the technique it showcases, the scene ends in a classically dramatic fashion, with a kind of catharsis — which, if you know The Sopranos, you know is hardly the word Tony has for it.

Related Content:

How David Chase Breathed Life into the The Sopranos

David Chase Reveals the Philosophical Meaning of The Soprano’s Final Scene

James Gandolfini Reads from Maurice Sendak’s Children’s Story In The Night Kitchen

Rewatch Every Episode of The Sopranos with the Talking Sopranos Podcast, Hosted by Michael Imperioli & Steve Schirripa

How Humphrey Bogart Became an Icon: A Video Essay

How David Lynch Manipulates You: A Close Reading of Mulholland Drive

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

Why James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano Is “the Greatest Acting Achievement Ever Committed to the Screen”: A Video Essay is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooksFree Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3cF6UFV
via Ilumina

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music: An Interactive, Encyclopedic Data Visualization of 120 Years of Electronic Music

In a very short span of time, the descriptor “electronic music” has come to sound as overly broad as “classical.” But where what we (often incorrectly) call classical developed over hundreds of years, electronic music proliferated into hundreds of fractal forms in only decades. A far steeper quality curve may have to do with the ease of its creation, but it’s also a factor of this accelerated evolution. Music made by machines has transformed since its early 20th-century beginnings from obscure avant-garde experiments to massively popular genres of global dance and pop. This proliferation, notes Ishkur—designer of Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music —hasn't always been to the good. Take what he calls “trendwhoring,” a phenomenon that spawns dozens of new works and subgenera in short order, though it’s arguable whether many of them should exist. Ishkur, describes this process below in an excerpt from his erudite, sardonic “Frequently Unasked Questions”: If fart noises were sudde...

A 10 Billion Pixel Scan of Vermeer’s Masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring: Explore It Online

We admire Johannes Vermeer’s  Girl with a Pearl Earring   for many reasons , not least that it looks exactly like a girl with a pearl earring. Or at least it does from a distance, as the master of light himself no doubt stepped back to confirm countless times during the painting process, at any moment of which he would have been more concerned with the brushstrokes constituting only a small part of the image. But even Vermeer himself could have perceived only so much detail of the painting that would become his masterpiece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKaZYTwmjwU Now, more than 350 years after its completion, we can get a closer view of Girl with a Pearl Earring  than anyone has before through a newly released  10 billion-pixel panorama . At this resolution, writes Petapixel’s Jason Schneider , we can “see the painting down to the level of 4.4-microns per pixel.” Undertaken by Emilien Leonhardt and Vincent Sabatier of 3D microscope maker Hirox Europe ...

Drunk History Takes on the Father of Prohibition: The Ban on Alcohol in the U.S. Started 100 Years Ago This Month

There may be plenty of good reasons to restrict sales and limit promotion of alcohol. You can search the stats on traffic fatalities, liver disease, alcohol-related violence, etc. and you’ll find the term “epidemic” come up more than once. Yet even with all the dangers alcohol poses to public health and safety, its total prohibition has seemed “so hostile to Americans’ contemporary sensibilities of personal freedom,” writes Mark Lawrence Schrad at The New York Times , “that we struggle to comprehend how our ancestors could have possibly supported it.” Prohibition in the United States began 1oo years ago-- on January 17, 1920--and lasted through 1933. How did this happen? Demand, of course, persisted, but public support seemed widespread. Despite stories of thousands rushing bars and liquor stores on the evening of January 16, 1920 before the 18th Amendment banning alcohol nationwide went into effect, “the final triumph of prohibition was met with shrugs…. The United States had...