Great point about the lack of humor. I didn’t laugh at anything in the movie. I get that there were multiple wink-and-nod allusions to events of the TV show that were intended to be funny and/or ironic, but I wasn’t laughing.
You’re absolutely right about the total absence of absurdist humor. I think about an episode that I recently rewatched... the one in which Adriana wants to get into the music industry. Christopher’s behavior at the studio, i.e., beating the musicians to motivate them to cut an album is darkly but absurdly funny. There’s none of that in this movie.
Ultimately, it really does come down to tone. This is the Sopranos’ universe, sure, but it’s that universe as seen in a Scorsese pastiche. It’s like, after 14 years or whatever, they forget their brand. I guess I could forgive that if it really worked... just as different iterations of the Batman franchise have wildly different tones, e.g., ranging from campy and tongue-in-cheek to darkly violent and unapologetically serious. But as a straight-ahead period mob flick à la Goodfellas, it just doesn’t succeed.
Couldn't agree more. Beating up the ice cream man, joyriding his truck and stealing his merchandise just didn't come off as ludicrous, because it was a promising young man (whose character development fans came there to see) going down the wrong path; yet the film's only comment was when some of the adults called it a prank. Sad.
You would wish that with such a key incident, that there be some expansion on how his mother, father or Uncle Dickie handled it. Was Tony punished? Beaten? Encouraged and enabled? You want to see played out the type of influences that directly corrupted this smart, smiling and morally neglected boy who became a murderous mob boss. The young Tony in Many Saints wasn't even there to witness Uncle Dickie committing his two major atrocities, or know that Dickie was cuckolded by someone Dickie felt superior to. Tony being rejected by Dickie on Christmas and looking at the corpse was not enough.
Speaking for myself as a fan, I was less interested in Dickie's love life than in wanting an examination of what laid waste to Tony's soul. The school counselor scene was excellent. There should also have been a clear bridge between the indifferent mothering of Livia in the movie and her conspiracy with Uncle Junior in the TV series to have her own son whacked.
The casting: Johnny Boy Soprano and Corrado (Uncle Junior) did not look enough alike to have been brothers. The arrestingly handsome Billy Mangussen as Paulie Walnuts? Should have given him a prosthetic nose, or used a more grizzled character actor. And in an unfortunate miscasting that many films make, Dickie's wife and his goomar looked too much alike at a glance. The Italian beauty was suitably exotic up close; and while many guys do have a "type", the two women's similar manes of black hair was hard to keep distinct at the rapid pace of the scenes.
The cinematography: We saw 90% the same two camera angles of every conversation between Dickie and his imprisoned uncle. Throughout, there was little dynamic zooming, panning or overheads. Even the looting scenes—I may be wrong, but my main impression was two camera angles: shoulder height from the street to the storefronts, and up on a crane to depict the destroyed shopping street. It's so easy today with drones to hover and move over a street scene. There was cinematic gold left in the mine there. I'm thinking of the gritty 2015 film Spotlight, which also had very few locations, yet utilitzed outstanding film editing and camerawork, garnering multiple nominations and awards.
Lawrence Konner, the only Many Saints writer credited alongside the creator David Chase, was with the original Sopranos series, but wrote only three Sopranos episodes and three script adaptations—out of approximately 120 episodes—and he wasn't one of the main writers. Many Saints' director, Alan Taylor, had only directed 9 of the TV episodes.