4/22/2007 The Sopranos : Remember When

Good episode, bordering on great.



Great writing and fantastic acting, but I felt like there were too many poor directorial choices to keep it from being great.The episode begins with Tony waking up, arising and noticing Paulie Walnuts strutting up his driveway, paper in hand. The look on T’s face indicates that he knows he’s going to be greeting another unhappy day. I like the touch that he takes Paulie out to his garden and admires his tomatoes before acknowledging, and almost forgetting, his morning guest and the almost certain unfortunate tidings he bears. That’s a nice little touch there and ties into his outlook in the early-to-middle episodes of last season when the character took opportunities to express his admiration of the smaller things in life. I have already said this but I haven’t seen the season’s premier or the first half of episode. 2, so there are some things I’m unaware of but I’m under the impression that the premier opened with Tony and Carmela waking up, perhaps similar to the way this episode opened. Did the 2nd episode begin that way too? Just curious.



Alrightey, so the main plot line, or rather “co-main plot line”, of the episode is Tony and Paulie lamming it because apparently Larry Boy Bares is talking to the Feds after getting popped at the Cleaver premier and has led them to a body which just so happens to be Tony’s first kill. I guess this guy, a bookmaker named Willie Overalls, was the cherry popper Tony alluded to in the season 2 conversation with Pussy at the restaurant after they killed Matthew Drinkwater. Murder must make you hungry. I used to like the way the writers of this show would recall characters and events that seemed like one-off lines but I think this one was a little too meta. No biggie though.



The character development stemming from these developments is that, while forced to spend a considerable amount of time in close quarters with him, Tony starts getting an uneasy feeling about the loyalty of the aforementioned Mr. Walnuts. Questioning both his loyalty to himself and his path of Omerta, we see Tony express his inner debate to Beansie later in the episode after several little incidents in which Paulie shows himself to be not only an incorrigible gossip and motormouth, he shows an incredibly stupid lack of judgment in deciding exactly which stories are appropriate to share. The other side of Tony’s inner debate interjects that Paulie shows daring brash and unquestionable toughness, as he always has, and that he has now decided that Paulie meant no disrespect with the retouching and hanging of the portrait depicting Tonapoleon Sopranoparte. Central to Tony’s conflicting interpretations of Paulie’s actions and comments is “the joke”. As the writers wring the last bit of life out of the season 4 plot device, Tony peppers Paulie with repeated questions alternating between asking him “Who coulda?” “Why woulda?” and “Woulda you?” Somewhere in that debate fits in Paulie’s bizarre and intense enjoyment of Three’s Company which apparently affects Tony so much his only coping mechanism is to get really, REALLY, liquored up. After the late night conversation with Beansie, Tony decides what to do. Now I don’t know how the rest of you felt about the boat scene, but I think it was one of the more memorable out of the recent seasons. I really think that Tony didn’t know which way that whole boat ride was going to turn out when he set out, and if he did then I don’t think the original plan was for Paulie to come back. Ever the master strategist, Sun Tazoo, T sets Paulie up perfectly. I think if Paulie had copped to telling Johnny Sac about the joke, if he in any way would have acknowledged that yes, indeed, it was he who talked out of school, if he would have put his faith in Tony’s reassurances that it was “okay” and that it was no big deal, if he would have acted the way all of us in the viewing audience felt was acceptable and revealed that he did it and was remorseful for it, then Peter Paul Gualtieri would have ceased being Paulie Walnuts and would have become Paulie Chumnuts in those waters off the coast of Florida. Tony set up a scenario of incredibly intense pressure for his old friend, plied him with alcohol and friendly assurances that he should have no fear of retribution, and finally tested Walnuts. He answered his own question, the one he posed to Beansie by the pool side after denigrating him constantly, the one we all saw in the promo, “Has he really ever been tested?” He put him to the test and found the answer satisfactory. Paulie didn’t fold under questioning, not even under repeated questioning and verbal abuse from his definition of God on earth, his skipper Tony Soprano. I think in that moment it quashed Tony’s inner debate resoundingly. Paulie would never fold under questioning from cops or feds, even with the prospect of 20 years behind the wall, if he didn’t fold, and was even able to turn his back and await his death, when he had to know Tony could have just as easily gone for a gun than for a Glen Livet. I remember thinking, once Tony glanced over to the mini-axe, “this could be the end of Paulie” and just how weird that would be. I also noted that Tony did look like he was rather begrudgingly sparing his old friend’s life.



The other main plot line for the episode featured an increasingly unpredictable uncle junior getting his swagger back in the low security loony bin and taking under his wing a troubled young man with his own unpredictable emotional problems. The character development that was brought out of this plot line turned out to be a convincingly solid exploration of Junior’s increasing senility, his apparent acceptance with his place in life, and his ability to be both insightful mentor and cruel tormentor with the bright and capable young men that gravitate to a man of his character and charisma. This was also some of the best acting, almost all the way around, that you’ll get when The Sopranos uses that many characters. It got a little heavy handed when the character mistakenly called the character “Carter”, a rich and unassuming young Asian man in his late 20’s-early 30’s, by his nephew’s name “Anthony”…just IN CASE we were all missing the point. I can’t knock it too much though because while the viewing audience was aware of just what was going on that was the point that Carter caught on to just what was happening, so I guess the reveal had to happen some way. The inevitable outcome occurs at the very end when Carter, an unstable young man prone to violent outbursts tied up somehow into his relationship with his father, feeling betrayed and cast aside, violently attacks Junior in a scene that was hard for me to watch. I know Junior is an amoral sombitch who has done many evil things in his life and that such characters should be hard to feel sympathy for. But to see an old man, suffering from senility, catch such a violent beat down from someone he very much thought of as a friend and confident, that just made me feel very sad for the man. The last shot of him, bruised and broken as he seeks comfort in solace with a kitten on his lap, seems to me to be highly possibly the last image we will get of the man. Alone, confused, and hurting, Corrado Soprano Jr. will die that way surrounded by people he does not know nor enjoy, still trying in vain to avoid punishment from the government he has openly flouted his entire adult life.



Title: "Remember When" – Tony describes this as the lowest form of conversation. Now whether that was just a shot at Paulie to get him to shut up or whether he really believes that is open to interpretation in my opinion. But I find it quite telling that the elder statesmen of the Soprano family, the only ones who come to visit Junior and show great loyalty to the man by trying to engineer an escape for the man, aren’t the ones engaged in such behavior; rather it is the generation below them, the current leadership, who have nothing to discuss but their glorious and bygone youth. Tony expresses in this episode that things are really going well for him and perhaps this is part of why he finds talk of bygone days, days he didn’t find as rosy and wonderful as his compatriots apparently did, to be annoying and unworthy of him.



((Okayplayer.com Forum Pass The Popcorn)) Consensus: I know that much had been made of the flashbacks, I’m assuming the ones of Pussy on the boat and not the ones at the beginning of the murder of the bookie, as being a horrible and heavy handed way of conveying Paulie’s uneasiness of setting out with Tony on the boat. As I stated in my opening sentence, my overall review of the episode, I found some choices made by the director to be poor and I’m not confident in saying that this was an exceptionally well directed episode. However, and in contrast to my initial viewing of this episode, the second time I watched that entire boat scene sequence I realized that flashbacks weren’t such a poor choice. Without them all you would have is a long shot of the boat pulling away from the dock with Paulie, standing (as only he can) stiff as a board with his elbows at 45 degrees and his hands not-yet-clasped in front if him, looking pensive and pallid aboard the Sea Voo Play. A brief collection of clipped shots alerting newer viewers to just maybe why Paulie had been acting uneasy and distracted ever since T mentioned “going sport fishing” out on the boat just the scene before. The stuff I did have a problem with though, since you asked, were the clumsy directorial choices that were not only unnecessary but in some cases damped the drama and could have easily been cropped. For example, showing Uncle Junior’s Doug Henning of the medicine as the orderlies backs were turned was not only silly to show but poorly done. As was the showing of his reluctant acceptance of having to take the medicine to avoid being the comatose piss and shit factory he would eventually become without taking his meds. Those were pretty much tedious and in the instance of the first deception, kind of dampened the drama. There was NOTHING as tedious, nor as gratuitous, no not even Tony’s thrust n’ grunt and obligatory roll over to a cigar, as the slow and deliberate pan up to Doc Santoro’s Bugsy Siegel/Moe Green/Brendan Fillone blown out eyeball. Can we say unnecessary gore and inordinately bloody money shot, kids? Good, I knew we could.



What’s left?



Not much Carm this week but man oh man did they nail it with her bitching about Paulie’s “I’m sorry, Tony” gift of the Williams-Sonoma espresso machine. What was the first thing out of her mouth when she complained? That’s right, the price tag. If ever there was a character on The Sopranos who has defined everything in their life by material worth, it is Carmela Soprano.



Tony’s gambling. Nice to see Hesh checking in by phone, apparently while dining at the Plot Point Deli, to grant Tony a 200k loan to cover lost bets. A string of losers lately is costing T some pretty pennies and if the promos are to be believed, and they must be, THEY MUST BE because they never lie dammit, it’s going to come to a head with Carmela and her spec house from Hell. Swear I saw Tom Hanks and Shelley Long stopping by to give Carm pointers about how she could possibly speed the construction process up. I wonder if she still sleeps with the blueprints.