I am not a movie director. I am not a screenwriter. I am not a scholar of the televisual arts. But just for the record, I think the series finale of The Sopranos was as close to perfect as one hour of TV can get without the aid of Louise Lasser.
On a purely visual level, it was stunning. The lighting was breathtaking, blown out and toned to an ice-cold cyan. The settings were largely unfamiliar and intended to throw us off balance: barren backyards, a wintry beach house, the curiously stuffy office of a saucily dressed therapist. And the locales were dreamy, too: the Bada Bing, cavernous and devoid (for once) of strippers and oglers; a cheap motel room, horizontal, emotionless, flat as a pancake; and most notably, a garage so cold and so chock-full of oversize, alien car parts that it looked like the newest Soul Calibur arena.
I could go on and on about the weirdness of the plot, the unfolding and refolding of plot lines, the continuation of David Chase’s addictive, trademark mixture of the grotesque (mob violence) and the mundane (family life and cats). But I won’t go on and on. I just want talk about the things that made my heart race and my eyes sting in the show’s last five minutes:
-
The colors, or absence thereof: the film’s green and brown tint made the scene at the diner feel as nostalgic as a 16mm film reel and as surreal as a Magritte painting.
-
The music: I may be showing my age, but I really don’t think you can ever go wrong with Journey.
-
The normalcy of it all: with young couples and truck drivers and other families around them, the Soprano family looked like just another bunch of people in a sea of people, with their own set of problems and accomplishments. Given the extraordinary things we’ve seen some of them do (e.g. Carmela strapping on an automatic weapon in season one), that’s kinda remarkable.
-
The menace of it all: the camera lingers on the man at the bar, shows him looking for the unfamiliar restroom. Could he have been brought in for the hit? Then there’s the group of young men who hover not far from the door. What’s their story? And best of all: Meadow’s arrival, alone, in her car, on an empty street on a cold night. The way it’s cut, with the background music underscoring the urgency of it all, we’re on the edge of our seats wanting her to park the damn car, get in the restaurant, get to safety before something happens. Then the ante is upped: we understand that when she sits, she’ll be positioned between Tony and any potential trouble. The man goes to the bathroom as she’s walking toward the front door. She enters, but is she too late?
-
The ambiguity of it all: the episode’s only shortcomings arose when things got too clean, too literary. Killing Phil, for example, was probably unnecessary, and we definitely didn’t need to see Tony in the backyard, looking in vain for those goddamn symbolic ducks. The messiness of the Uncle Junior storyline, the Janice storyline, and of course, the very last second…. It’s all so real and complex and gooey. I mean, if my life were a miniseries–and no one’s saying it isn’t–I can’t think of a clean, clear moment to wrap it up. Whose life works like that?
P.S. All those pussies debating what the blackout “means” have clearly missed the point.
sturtle [dot] com 