Heading into this review, I am trying to keep one important fact in mind: I am exactly the target audience for this documentary, Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos.
I keep that in mind, because if I don’t, I will be tempted to gush about how everyone should see it, and I know that that is not necessarily the case. If everyone saw it, the people that are, like me, denizens of subreddits, parody X accounts, and Facebook meme groups dedicated to The Sopranos, would find themselves enraptured in the nostalgia for a show that premiered a quarter of a century ago. However, the other folks — a likely sizable group of people that either watched the show occasionally or never felt the need to begin it in the first place — may be left feeling a little underwhelmed. And, believe me, it pains me to say that.
But the reality is that in the seventeen years since The Sopranos ended its run, it has now, as John Mulaney quipped about himself and Louis Farrakhan, come to mean a lot to a very small group of people. For viewers less invested in the mythos of David Chase and the television show that is generally cited as commencing the modern Golden Age of Television, this documentary may not translate as well. It’s clearly a love letter to the series, the man who created it, and the fans that sustained it. And who wants to read a love letter meant for someone else?
All that said, though, yes, everyone should see this documentary.
Director Alex Gibney (The Inventor, Totally Under Control) sits down with Sopranos creator and showrunner David Chase in a recreation of Dr. Melfi’s iconic office as they explore both Chase’s history and the show’s. The doc is cut into two parts, although I’m not sure why, considering they’ll premiere on the same night and clock in at just over two and a half hours when watched consecutively. Given the generally elongated runtimes of modern cinema ranging from Marvel to Nolan to Scorsese, this shouldn’t be a problem for most viewers.
The documentary begins as most biographical films do: at Chase’s early days. The difference, though, is that this doc literally starts speeding through Chase’s recollection of his childhood and adolescence. I became concerned initially, thinking I was watching a defective copy, but then it dawned on me that the doc is telling one of two jokes: that they’re fast forwarding to the more Sopranos-focused parts for us, or that Chase simply talks too much. Maybe both. Still, they speed run through his life, so I will too.
Chase was born, as lore tells us and Chase confirms, to an anxious, morose mother that would end up inspiring Livia’s character. He lived in suburban New Jersey, fell in with a bad group during adolescence, went to college, got married, found Fellini and Polanski, and decided filmmaking out West would be his best bet. He got work as a part of a company that made trashy, softcore pornography until he managed to get hired as a screenwriter for a more respectable outfit.
From here, he worked in television until enough people were able to convince him that he should write about his mother and sell the script as a feature or to a network as a show. Finally, we get to the mid 1990s, when HBO executives are greenlighting his pilot episode and Chase began the slow, integral work of casting. It is here that those two previously mentioned audiences will have wildly different viewing experiences.
Part 1’s behind-the-scenes footage of auditions is its strongest section. For dilettante Sopranos viewers, it will certainly be interesting to see the stressful process of choosing between so many actors auditioning for the same role and hearing so many plausible deliveries of the same few lines. For those diehard, expert viewers, the ones who can quote scenes at length and remember even peripheral and one-off characters fondly, it will be delightful and horrifying seeing what happened versus what could have been. Those people will cheer when they first see Michael Imperioli (The White Lotus) auditioning for Dean Moltisanti, but they will be disturbed seeing other, admittedly good actors saying words we know belong to him. It’s like viewing an alternate timeline where your spouse marries someone else — it might work out fine for people in that world, but it’s a terrifying prospect to everyone here.
Part 1 then shows us the stress of filming a pilot, screening it for test audiences, and waiting to hear if a company like HBO (then considered a television “backwoods”) will risk millions betting on a series. As we all know, the bet pays off a hundredfold, and Part 2 deals with the impact the series’ success has on the two men seemingly most responsible for bringing Tony Soprano to life: David Chase and the late James Gandolfini.
To say more about Part 2 would spoil what I consider to be the more interesting section of the documentary. We learn more about Gandolfini, an actor who (for better or worse) will always be associated with the iconic crook from New Jersey. We see how success was a double-edged sword both for a man who was a relatively unknown character actor prior to 1999 and a man who was ready to quit writing television in favor of feature films. Interviews from cast and crew include most of the principal players and even feature archival footage of Gandolfini and Nancy Marchand, who played demonic matriarch Livia Soprano. They lend a sense of loss to the doc, a feeling that both, but especially Gandolfini, died long before they had shown the world just how truly astonishing they were as actors.
If those divergent audiences I mentioned at the outset are able to agree on anything, it is this: Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos is a well-made documentary that acts as a reminder to the fans of how funny, tragic, and abominable Sopranos characters could be and just how idiosyncratic of a mind one would need in order to create them. If Part 1 feels a little stale to the point where even the filmmakers are joking about it, Part 2 makes up for that by questioning just how much a writer or actor can look into an abyss like Tony Soprano without the abyss staring back. Or, perhaps worse, questioning if that abysmal creature was a part of us all along.
Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos premieres Saturday, September 7, 2024, on Max and HBO at 8pm ET/PT.
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