"The Sopranos" finale: Whatever you want to believe

MomSeattle · DadSeattle · SPI · MySeattlePix · My account

Local

US/World

Sports

Business

A&E

Life

Comics

Photos

Opinion

Blogs

Buy Ads

Jobs

Autos

Homes

Rentals

NWsource

Blogs

TV Gal

« Buh-bye, Burke: Why Isaiah Washington's departure won't blow "Grey's" chemistry. | Main | "Big Love" is back -- pass the Cristalino »

"The Sopranos" finale: Whatever you want to believe

Wouldn't you know it, Tony Soprano met his maker while sharing onion rings with his wife and kids at a New Jersey diner.

You could also say Tony Soprano's last meal as a free man was the onion rings he shared with Carmela, his daughter, Meadow, and his son, A.J.

Or maybe they enjoyed their meal and went back to their suburban palace to live out their American dream.

"The Sopranos" finale left it up to the viewers to spin their own denouement in a blank space before the end credits, if they weren't bellowing curses or wondering whether the cable went out at the worst time possible.

You had to figure that series creator David Chase wasn't going to let Tony Soprano off easy, but to do this to the fans and bookies following nine episodes of theorizing whether he'd die or not? That's so cruel, it's brilliant.

Fitting, too, in a sense. Chase, who wrote and directed the finale, has fielded the question of whether Tony would live or die in the finale for years now, and you can only imagine he got tired of hearing it. So those final, tension-laden moments snapping off into a silent void was his way of answering, "Well, what do you think?"

He said as much in classic "Sopranos" fashion, letting the soundtrack speak for him � Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" blared behind them, Tony's selection on the table-top jukebox. (Journey won out over Heart's "Who Will You Run To?" and "A Lonely Place" by Tony Bennett.)

It really was a brilliant scene upon further dissection. Tony sits down, turns on the music and in struts Carmela. They engage in small talk before a shady-looking guy in an old Members Only jacket comes in, tailed by A.J. sporting the shiny, updated leather coat modeled on those '80s classics.

Meadow pulls up, but is having trouble fitting her car in the spot.

The man stirs his coffee, eyes Tony, and walks into the bathroom, slightly behind Tony -- an ode to the famous hit in the first "Godfather" flick. But then the camera trains on two men who either look like hip-hop stars or gangbangers. Are they the assassins? The targets? Or just two guys coming in for a burger?

Meadow still can't park.

Maybe they're all just regular people. Maybe they're all undercover FBI, setting up the sting. Agent Harris did seem happy, in an earlier scene, to hear the head of New York got whacked, gleefully blurting out, "We're gonna win this thing!" Rumor had it that one of Tony's men got flipped. Tony's lawyer heard that subpoenas are flying around and says he has upwards of an 80 percent chance of being indicted.

Meadow, finally, parks and runs across the street to the restaurant. We see Tony, watching the door, look up as the bell rings and -- it all goes black.

Nobody would blame a person for being ticked off at being quite literally left in the dark. Those miffed at being denied their answers would say that Chase shrugged off his responsibility as a storyteller. He'd tell them they're free to think that.

Besides, Chase did serve up the blood we demanded with quite the flourish. Phil Leotardo got his at a gas station, popped by an assassin before having his cranium squashed like a grape when the SUV carrying his infant grandchildren slowly rolled over it.

The symbolism couldn't be more obvious; at the end of a season all about the death of the mob and the independent businessman at the hands of American corporations, the head of New York gets crushed by a Ford truck. America, where the next generation rolls over the previous.

To look at it from another angle, "The Sopranos" has always been, at its core, an ongoing study in moral ambiguity. The show demanded that we constantly re-evaluate our feelings about Tony Soprano, juxtaposing his ruthless criminal side with the man who pulls his drowning, suicidal son from a swimming pool and cradles him, calling him his baby.

Thus, we're left with an unexceptional hour that did not try to sway us for or against Tony any more than we already were. The largest portion of this last episode was spent with Tony the family man and Tony the leader, taking stock of his life and seeing the mess he's reaped.

Tony's sister, Janice, is alone in her palace after husband Bobby's murder, already planning to keep his daughter in her clutches so her little girl will be happy. Silvio hangs by a thread in the hospital, and Paulie, wary of taking over a cursed crew after beating cancer, wonders if his days are numbered as well. A demented Junior is withering away in a rotten state facility.

The entire finale had a funereal, dream-like quality to it, from the opening moment with a tight shot of Tony's face against a white pillow, as if he were in a casket. Organ music pipes in -- and wakes him up. Almost immediately he's in a desolate place at night, stuck in a beverage truck driving around to visit his family. Everything outside of the Soprano home is shaded in cold blues and greys.

The last grand meal at Nuovo Vesuvio's was Bobby Baccalieri's funeral repast, with tubs of pasta and breaded meat. Then there's that cat, an ominous symbol of death and curses, who wandered into the safehouse one night and ends up in the back room of the Bing. He has a habit of staring at Christopher's picture and purring, which creeps out Paulie. But Tony thinks nothing of it.

"I'll tell you something, though," Tony says to Paulie in a confiding tone, setting us up so we think this will be a moment of reflections or mourning for Christopher. But it's not.

"Since his death, my gambling luck's done a 180."

See? Tony will never change for the better.

But life goes on and his family, at least, appears to be on the path to legitimate careers or something close enough. Meadow is on the path to become a highly paid lawyer � inspired, she said, by seeing the FBI haul off Tony so many times. Carmela hungrily eyes more real estate investments.

A.J., knocked into depression by opening his eyes to the realities of the world and adulthood, bitterly quotes Yeats after Bobby's funeral, accuses everyone of being blinded by the American Dream and threatens to join the army. But he easily falls back into his own sleepy version of life when his parents buy him a luxury car and get him a cush job at a mob connection's movie studio.

After 86 episodes, near universal acclaim, untold numbers of award nominations and wins � 18 Emmys for starters -- Chase wasn't going to kowtow to the whims of an audience gambling on whether his anti-hero would fall.

Instead, Chase chose to satisfy his own demands. He always has.

"Focus on the good times," A.J. said to Tony as they eat their onion rings, but it might as well have been Chase chatting with us.

Now that it's over, we can believe whatever we want. But is that enough?

Posted by at June 10, 2007 9:43 p.m.
Category: HBO

Comments

#36132

Posted by dawgalum at 6/10/07 10:15 p.m.

I have seen every episode of The Sopranos. Every one of them. I was patient with last season. I hoped the final season would be better. How disappointing. For those who will say the finale was somehow artistic, I wholly disagree. It was one of the least artistic, least creative moments imaginable given the early magnitude of this series. The moral of the entire 86-series seems to be "life goes on." Ho hum. What a cop out...it was fun while it lasted, though.