Wistfulness is probably not the first emotion you'd associate with the Mafia, unless, that is, you've been watching "The Sopranos," the smoothly crafted crime-and-family drama that sailed into its second season on HBO this month. This Emmy-winning series has a lot going for it—keen characterizations, an offbeat narrative rhythm, a droll sense of irony—but what really gives it a distinctive flavor is its atmosphere of subtle nostalgia. Life has proved to be something of a disappointment for the show's protagonist, Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), an amiable suburban homeowner who just happens to be the leader of a New Jersey mob clan.
Of course, he and his fellow gangsters know that the great days of organized crime have passed them by, but their malaise is on some level more general—a bona fide freefloating angst, all the more distressing for being vague. In an early session with his phlegmatic therapist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco), Tony struggled to define his melancholy, which he had associated with a flock of wild ducks that had setfled briefly in his backyard swimming pool; when they flew away, they became vague symbols for departed innocence and honesty, a defunct code of honor, childhood, nature before the Fall.
Metaphor on this level may sound more suited to the poetry of William Wordsworth than to a show on premium cable, but anyone who hasn't yet encountered "The Sopranos" should rest assured that the series stays down-to-earth even when it gets mythic. The story's piquancy, after all, depends on the fact that, though they move in criminal circles, the characters are just folks, like you or me. When he is not coordinating thugs and hitmen, Tony Soprano has to drive his daughter to visit colleges and worry about his aging mother (one arch shot in an early episode showed him reading a manual on elder care in the strip joint he and his "colleagues" use as headquarters).
Shrewd writing allows the program to get good mileage out of this concept. In one hypermundane exchange from the first season, for example, Tony's fretful wife Carmela (Edie Falco) commented on their school-age son, Anthony, Jr. (Robert Iler), who may have attention deficit disorder, "You never noticed how he picks at the tongue of his tennis shoe?" In addition to strewing around such well-observed lines, the scriptwriters often opt for anticlimax as a plot technique: When Carmela and her lonely friend the local priest (Paul Schulze) fell into temptation, alone in her house late at night, for example, they resisted. The slightly deflated feeling at the end of such an episode makes the show seem more like real life.
The Sopranos' frequently banal existence contrasts strongly with Hollywood-caliber Mafia legend, a fact that is not lost on the characters themselves. Eyes newly opened to the family business, Anthony, Jr., confronted his father with the remark, "It's just like in Godfather I!" as the pair head to the orthodontist. This metacultural motif reverberates particularly in the subplots involving Christopher (Michael Imperioli), the impetuous young gangster-in-waiting who is desperate to be officially "made." Christopher thinks of himself as a latter-day Corleone (or is it Al Pacino?); in fact, his life is so metaliterary that he is writing a screenplay about mobsters—write about what you know, right? "It says in the scriptwriting book that every character has an arc," he fumed at one point. "Where's my arc?" It is hard to live up to pop culture.
The legacy of their flesh-and-blood forebears can be just as much of a downer for the Soprano gang. "Values today! Standards are crumbling!" griped a restaurateur friend of Tony's (John Ventimiglia) on seeing a youth wear a hat during an elegant dinner. Similarly backward- looking, Tony's mother Livia (Nancy Marchand) frequently rhapsodizes about her dead husband ("He was a saint!"). All too conscious of the tradition they've inherited, the characters in "The Sopranos" hurtle up against a modern, matter-of-fact world that makes them feel like fish out of water. When Tony and friends tried to prevent the departure of a local school soccer coach by using quintessential mob tactics (kidnapping the man's golden retriever, for example) their efforts seemed absurd. And when Christopher tried to infiltrate the music business—a field the Mafia used to rule, he assured his girlfriend—he found his way blocked by gangster rappers.
The show's characters may not fully understand that their standards are outdated, but they do sense that something is wrong with the way they define themselves. Tony Soprano has panic attacks not because his job is stressful (even if he does have to hide his guns beneath his mother's sweaters when the feds are on the rampage), but because he feels oppressed by the roles that define him: mobster, leader, husband, father, son (this last poignantly expressed, in one episode, by a shot that showed him standing awkwardly in his mother's empty house, after she had moved into a nursing home).
What has gone wrong for Tony and his associates is that the artificiality of their mobster identities—inherited in large part from Francis Ford Coppola—makes their whole existence feel artificial, and it is this contagion that infuses "The Sopranos" with melancholy. Life today doesn't seem real or immediate enough to the show's characters, who mourn a past they think had more value. Perhaps their story resonates particularly with a public that, on one level, harbors similar suspicions. An exchange between Tony and his therapist in the very first episode hinted in this direction. When her patient confessed to an unshakable feeling that the "best is over," Dr. Melfi replied, "I think a lot of Americans feel like that."
