Film Illiterate, wherein the proprietor records movies seen, and sporadic progress through assorted lists of the "best". Originally started after regretfully renting something forgettable for the third time. I've forgotten what, but never again! A tedious endeavour since 2005. Hello. 🙂
(Warning: the following contains major spoilers for the series finale.)
It's hard to believe that The Sopranos is over for good. While I think that it's declined in recent seasons as it grew more and more self-important, it's always been at the forefront of the new wave of quality television for adults. Without The Sopranos, would we have The Wire or The Shield or Deadwood?
It's a little depressing that a series which began with its protagonist (James Gandolfini's Tony Soprano) entering therapy, a small but important step towards self-improvement, should end with such pessimism, even fatalism. Therapist Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) has given up; Tony wants to complain, not to change. It's hardly an unfamiliar refrain: throughout the series we've rooted for the various characters who've tried to escape -- Christopher (Michael Imperioli), Adriana (Drea de Matteo), Tony (Steve Buscemi) -- and, without exception, they've failed to do so. The last season withdraws all possibility of hope for Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) and Carmela (Edie Falco), long our last best hopes, and even A.J. (Robert Iler), whose recent bout of solipsistic whinging offered at least a remote possibility of real change. Not so.
But the tumble from false hope to lost hope is always painful; it's not David Chase's fault. Does the final sequence "just go black" because Tony has been shot, like Phil (Frank Vincent), earlier in the same episode, without ever seeing his assassin? Certainly it was constructed to be open to several interpretations, with threat after crowding threat, from mysterious truckers to nameless black youths to Meadow crossing the street without looking both ways.
I side with those who see it as an ending where life goes on, but a "life" revealed as something so stagnant and well-understood that there's simply no need to continue. Does it matter if Tony dies there and then, or later, at another iteration of the same scene in one year or ten years time? Or if, like Junior (Dominic Chianese) and Livia (Nancy Marchand), he just fades away, alone and alienated. It's all just the same old bullshit, over and over again.
By the same token, though, I find it hard to appreciate the previous eight years in hindsight. All that drama, all that (apparent) character development, all of it was for nothing? I'm not sure I could bear to watch it again. Of course, the final season was open about attacking its audience's grotesque fascination with such a fundamentally abhorrent lifestyle -- but being the target of such dismissive contempt is hardly likely to engender warm feelings.
Oh, it's worth watching either way, but there's a change: for a while, The Sopranos was great entertainment, albeit entertainment with fierce moral criticism attached; now it's something else. If you prefer your media to talk to you, not down at you, it's best to stop watching early.
For better analysis of the final episode, try Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall. Their respective comment sections argue for just about every alternative theory, so there's plenty of food for thought.