As Tony Soprano on HBO’s "The Sopranos," James Gandolfini was a cultural icon. Gruff, menacing, charming—when he waddled outside the sliding glass doors of his generic mansion, his bathrobe half-opened with no dialogue, Gandolfini had the look of a man already in mid sentence. And we were instantly on the ride with him.
I don’t really give a rat’s ass if James Gandolfini drank to excess or if he ate a lot of rich food before he died last week at age 51. Today I ate a giant piece of banana chocolate chip cake. Sometimes we humans go off the reservation.
In the hands of James Gandolfini, Tony Soprano was heartbreaking, unapologetically indulgent, gentle, an unenlightened throwback, an astute existentialist.
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He was the Millenium Everyman. Tony didn’t have the benefit of a plan, but he knew, like the ducks by his swimming pool, he would ultimately be defined by his own inalienable circumstance.
Circumstances that Gandolfini let us in on; like it or not: standing dumbfounded and unshaven in his undershirt and boxer shorts at his property’s border looking for the migrating ducks, or smiling in a hunting cap as he paddled Big Pussy to meet his maker on the lake in a boat, or kneeling in a designer suit to cut up dead Ralphie’s body in the bathtub. Tony stared at every unsatisfying outcome and plunged himself further into darkness.
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Without Gandolfini's Tony, there would be no Jon Hamm's Don Draper as this decade’s less visceral but no less conflicted icon from TV’s "Mad Men."
I couldn’t wait to see Gandolfini’s cat-and-mouse dance in his scenes with his shrink Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco); his inner rage as he battled like a little boy with his shrill, victorious mother Livia (Nancy Marchand); his self-loathing Hamlet-like sparring with his uncle Junior (Dominic Chianese); and his swaggering bedroom-eyed womanizing that always fell short when it came to keeping his own wife Carmela (Edie Falco) under his spell.
Gandolfini owed much to the writers here, we all do. Tony Soprano was a force of nature, wrapped in an elegant script.
Yet it was in Gandolfini’s fearless leaps of faith on the small screen where huge emotion was palpable; temperament, smothering; behavior, destiny. And always, he betrayed an exhausting appetite as the beautiful brute of life pushed him further along toward a final migration off screen. Gandolfini illuminated this, pinned us to the mat and gave us a character so refined that he was a cultural icon.
