The Many Saints Of Newark (HBO)
Starring Alessandro Nivola , William Ludwig,Michael Gandolfini , Leslie Odom Jr., Jon Bernthal, Corey Stoll, Billy Magnussen, Michela De Rossi, John Magaro, Ray Liotta, and Vera Farmiga
Directed by Alan Taylor
Rating: ***
Another bloodsplattered mobster film? Hang on. Don’t go . This one is not your usual dog-eat-dog carnival of violence with bullets and guns punctuated by heavy fornication.
A prequel to the very successful series The Sopranos, The Many Saints Of Newark is NOT about saints.Sinners of the thirst order, the characters in this slick spin on the wages of sin are motivated only by self-interest.They shoot to kill. And they seldom miss. In this bottomless mire of bottom snatchers there is a tender bonding happening between young Tony Soprano(William Ludwig) and his favourite uncle the ruthless mobster Dickie Moltisanti played brilliantly by Alessandro Nivola.
Nivola manages to make his affections for Tony look so unvarnished that I wished to see that relationship occupy centrestage in the plot. David Chase and Lawrence Konner’s screenplay is a beehive of activity.It barely allows any relationship to grow. Even the smartly morbid lust-kinship between Dickie’s father and Dickie’s immigrant stepmother,played with a dithering seductiveness by Michela De Rossi is a heaving hyphen.
This is the rapidly-developing crime-infested greed-invested New Jersey of the late 1960s. The guns go off without warning , blowing off heads and spinning off tales of torture and revenge that no grandma can tell to her inquisitive grandchildren
Greed is the defining spirit of the world built by the creators of The Sopranos. This peppy peppery precursor to the series is a bullet-ridden quasi-classic, willing to go where no law-abiding man dares. Darkly lit on slippery streets, the film gives off the stench of a decadent culture of violence without seeming to patronize the people who populate this dying creed of violence and greed.
Be warned: some of the violence is way over-the-top. In one shootout a black man’s mouth is violated with a drilling machine in ways a dentist would have never imagined. The sequence in which Dickie murders his father in a car is jolting in its impact.Interestingly the wonderful Ray Liotta plays Dickie’s father and his father’s twin brother in jail. Once the father is snuffed out the twin takes over from prison from where he serves out invaluable gyan to Dickie,the best one being, ‘Stay away from Tony.’
Lucky for the screenplay that Dickie doesn’t listen. Serving up lessons in internecine warfare The Many Saints Of Newark proves itself one of the sturdiest most solid gangster films in recent times. The entire aura of a bleeding social network is established with painful fluency.