So I Rewatched The Many Saints of Newark

Sigh, what is up Sopranos fans… Kino here.

When I made a video about rewatching The Sopranos again, I knew I would eventually have to rewatch The Many Saints of Newark as well. Now, I’ve talked a few times before about my thoughts on the film, but it makes sense to take another look and see if anything has changed. Oftentimes a movie can grow on you the more you watch it, or you’ll notice things you didn’t before that change your perspective.

So I sat down and rewatched the film, hoping to come away with a new perspective that I could use in the video. However, watching the film again, I still feel the same way I did the first time I watched it. The film has a lot of flaws, and really needed another pass to make the ideas of the script more coherent. I can see what David Chase was going for with the movie, but it just needed to be integrated more smoothly to the existing Sopranos universe.

Now I don’t think it’s as bad as people give it crap for. Or at least, the problems that people bring up about the film are not the problems that I have with it. And in fact, there are many elements like the acting and visual style of the film that I genuinely like. But the film does have issues that have not improved with time, and I think those issues are worth examining again.

So one more time, let’s talk about The Many Saints of Newark.

For those that never saw it, I’ll give a quick rundown of the film. The Many Saints is a prequel to the Sopranos, set in the late 1960s and into the 1970s. The movie follows Dickie Moltisanti, the father of Christopher and a mentor/big brother figure to Tony Soprano. As Dickie deals with his family problems in the golden age of the mob, he must also deal with the rising racial tension growing in Newark around this time.

Alright let's start with what I like about the film. As I said before, I think the casting is really good. Alessandro Nivola as Dickie is extremely likable. I can easily see how Tony looked up to Dickie growing up, he just comes off like the fun but troublemaking older brother that all of us wanted growing up.

Speaking of Tony, Michael Gandolfini also does an amazing job portraying the younger version of his father’s iconic character. James Gandolfini unfortunately passed away from a heart attack in 2013, and it’s honestly very touching that Michael got to honor his father’s memory with this role.

Jon Bernthal, Corey Stoll, and Vera Farmiga all do a very good job portraying younger versions of iconic Sopranos characters. The only casting that really didn’t do anything for me is John Magaro as a young Silvio Dante. That’s the only performance that feels like a caricature, which is weird considering that John had previously starred as the main character of Chase’s first film Not Fade Away. You’d think that since they worked together that closely before, Chase would have corrected his performance this time around. But it may be due to The Many Saints actually being directed by Alan Taylor, which we’ll talk about in a little bit.

Before we get into what I dislike about the film though, I want to talk about some criticism of the film that I’ve seen that I don’t agree with. One criticism that is constantly thrown at the film is about the Harold subplot. A significant chunk of the movie is dedicated to Harold’s antagonism towards Dickie, and the growing wealth and independence of African Americans in Newark. Many people thought that the inclusion of this storyline was a waste of time, and not relevant to a movie about The Sopranos which is predominantly about Italians.

One very prominent example of this is Michael Franzese’s review of the film, where he really raged against the racial angle of the film. He was offended at how the mobsters were portrayed as racist, and a lot of other people echo this sentiment and accuse the film of being woke.

However, I don’t think that the Harold subplot was fundamentally a bad idea. I agree that it wasn’t executed well, but racial tension has always been a theme in The Sopranos. It’s a recurring detail in the show that the mafia uses black people both literally and figuratively as scapegoats for their crimes.

In the episode Commendatori, we see a family get car jacked by some black guys. The father then screams the “n-word”, blaming them for the situation. But we immediately cut from him to Tony, showing that it’s actually his operation that stole their car.

Another example is when planning his hit on Tony, Junior used black guys so that it wouldn’t lead back to him. Tony and Chris did the same thing as well when they were planning their hit on Carmine Senior.

Now they utilized other people for their hits as well, like the Italians they brought over from Naples. But the guys also blame their crimes on black guys that don’t even exist. After Eugene beats up Little Paulie, Vito says they’ll blame it on some black guys if anyone calls the police.

When Tony Blundetto is trying to cover up that he was injured killing Joey Peeps, he makes up a story about getting jumped by black guys.

And of course when Tony is trying to hide the fact that he had a panic attack that forced him to miss a job, he blames it on black guys as well.

It even extends to goomahs. When Christopher is hiding the fact that he’s dating Julianna Skiff behind Tony’s back, he makes up an imaginary black goomah so that he has an excuse for not bringing her around.

There’s also a whole story arc in season 3 about Meadow and Tony’s relationship breaking down because he is racist towards her boyfriend and black people in general.

My point with all of this is just to show that the relationship between black people and the mafia is something the Sopranos actually explored. Again I don’t think the way it was executed in the actual film was good, and the character of Harold was not well developed. But to say that the movie fundamentally should not have addressed the issue is nonsense to me.

Another criticism that I do kind of get, is that the movie gets several details from the show wrong. There are several things that the movie presents that don’t match up with what he learned on the show, including characters' ages. For example Tony is only supposed to be around 9 or 10 years older than Christopher, but when Chris is a baby Tony is already a teenager.

There are also several events from this era that we saw in flashbacks on the show, or were told about by the characters. And several of these events don’t really line up with what we saw before. For example we see the scene where Johnny Boy is arrested at the fair in the episode “Down Neck”. In that version, Tony isn’t picked up by the police like he is in the movie.

Another example is when Johnny Boy shoots Livia in her hair. In the show, Janice says that it was Junior and his goomah in the car with them, while in the movie it’s Dickie and Joanne.

Now I think I kind of get what the film was going for. It’s meant to show that Tony and the other characters in the show are not reliable narrators. Even in flashbacks, we’re getting the events as Tony remembers them, and memories can be inaccurate, especially decades after the fact.

I think that was meant to be one of the central themes when it comes to the movie. For example in the show, we learn from Christopher that Dickie was an alcoholic and a drug addict.

However in the film, we don’t see Dickie use drugs. Instead when he’s found dead, they find pills in his pocket that he was getting for Livia. The implication is that Dickie’s reputation as a drug addict was the result of this misunderstanding, and we’re meant to question some of our assumptions from the show.

Now I think that this is a good theme, and would honestly make some of the choices in the movie make sense. However there is a problem. We do actually see Dickie drinking vodka that he’s hiding. This kind of contradicts the idea that he wasn’t an addict like Christopher said. Now we can explain this away as maybe being a one off thing, but it just leads to my overall problem with the film. It’s confused. It doesn’t quite know what it wants to say, and these little details end up contradicting themselves.

Another case is the character of Sally Moltisanti, Dickie’s uncle in prison. Many people felt these scenes were very weird and didn’t make sense. Sally is just such a strange character, someone who killed a made guy but is still alive in prison, and is obsessed with jazz for some reason. It was so off, many people including myself assumed that they were hallucinations in Dickie’s mind, a result of his guilt over killing his father, sort of like Tony’s hallucinations with Isabella in season 1.

I thought the same thing about Dickie’s story about coaching a blind little league baseball team. The way this scene is shot, it really makes it seem like it’s a delusion that Dickie has. However at the end of the film, we do see the blind kids at Dickie’s funeral, implying that he was actually coaching the team.

Again you see what I’m saying about the confusing messages the film gives? Even when I try to give the film the most charitable interpretation for its odd choices, it ends up contradicting those interpretations.

Overall, I think the film is a mess. I’ve talked about this before in my David Chase video, but Chase has always been interested in the Newark Riots. He’s used it before in his other show Almost Grown, and he famously always had an idea to do a film about riots. He ended up incorporating those elements into The Many Saints, but unfortunately did not tie it in closely enough to the characters to make it a compelling story.

One of the reasons for this disconnect is the fact that Chase did not direct the film himself. He unfortunately suffered from a heart attack before filming started, and that along with his wife being sick forced him to step back from the project. Now Alan Taylor is a good director. He directed many episodes of the Sopranos as well as other great television series. However I just feel like Chase not being as involved due to his health concerns hurt the picture.

The movie also seems to have been a mess in editing, and went through several iterations. Several things were cut from the original version, such as a scene with Edie Falco as Carmela that would have opened the movie. And I’m almost sure that Christopher narrating the movie from hell was a last minute addition, given how unincorporated it feels to the rest of the film.

However I do think the film had potential. All the elements of a great story are here, they just need to be reworked a little to give the characters and the plot a more tight narrative cohesion. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend checking out this video I did where I rewrote the Many Saints of Newark to better incorporate all these ideas.

But no matter how the film turned out, I am grateful that it exists. The reason my channel is successful is because of the film. My first video to blow up was a video explaining who Dickie Moltisanti was before the movie came out. People started really getting into Sopranos content after the movie was announced, and when it got delayed, it allowed me to do my Sopranolog series that really helped grow my channel into what it is today.

So no matter my thoughts on the film's overall quality, I will always be in dept to it and to David Chase. I hope you all enjoyed this look back, and stay tuned for more Sopranos content coming soon!