James Gandolfini

By AM Thursday, December 26, 2013

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When my son asked me if I liked Pussy, I was taken aback. It is not the sort of thing one expects from an eight year old. My wife and I each looked at one another. He then moved on to explain that he thought Big Pussy Bonpensiero was one of the better characters in The Sopranos. Initially of the view that he was yanking my chain, I realised he was not on a wind up. I suppressed a smile and told him that Big Pussy was a strange character who had let down his buddies and in that sense some people would not like him, paradoxically seeing him as something of a dick. By that point his focus had drifted back to his computer game so I was spared the hundred questions that he wants answers to when his interest is stirred.

Occasionally, he will watch The Sopranos if I am viewing it. I was a late convert to the show. An old friend had long urged me to watch it, claiming it was the best thing since the last best thing since whatever. From childhood, motivated by the television series Vendetta with its characters Danny Scipio and Angelo James – surprising what we can remember from over four decades ago considering that what was on this morning’s breakfast plate has disappeared without trace from the memory vault – I had an interest in the discourse around the mafia and had raced through The Godfather by Mario Puzo when I was 14 or 15. But I always treated it as a serious subject whereas The Sopranos seemed to inject humour into a home not its own.

Although a late starter, still only in the third season, it is clear that James Gandolfini, who died in Rome earlier this year, really held this series together. Such was the stature of the man that when he died the New Jersey governor instructed state flags to fly at half mast. A voracious book reader who was widely regarded as a very intelligent actor he once said in a parody of his profession that ‘standing in public in other people's clothes, pretending to be someone else - it's a strange way for a grown man to make a living.’ It is anything but. We learn so much from films. Cinema is a great cultural attribute, something that cannot be reduced to a mere pastime.

He acted in many films but I have seen none of them. The Sopranos was enough to make me take to the character. There were the stereotypes in the show for sure but he was not one of them, and managed to convey to audiences a plausible take on mob life in its many dimensions not captured in films like The Godfather or Goodfellas, although great movies in their own right. A mob boss prone to panic attacks, black outs and who regularly takes to the psychiatrist’s chair from where he spills it all out. A risky enough venture in a world of paranoia guided by the ethic ‘why take a chance?’ Tony Soprano was not the sort of character to be found in biographies of Sam Giancana or Lucky Luciano.

Former partner Lora Somoza claimed that an ‘unrelenting celebrity circus’ led to him seeking solace in drugs and alcohol which in turn did nothing for his health or the longevity of his life.

When I was with him it was at the height of his Sopranos fame. We were living in New York. He was an extremely private man who found fame very difficult to deal with ... he never thought he was as good as he was. He got accolade after accolade but he remained insecure. He didn’t believe the bullshit.

I look forward to continuing to the end of The Sopranos series but there is a huge vacuum that simply cannot be filled. The cigar smoking hulking figure clad in a bathrobe as he lounged around the house thinking murder and mayhem will be centre stage as a substantive presence but in my mind’s eye ‘Big Tony’ will be more spectral than real.