The Many Saints of Newark (2021)¶
At a glance¶
- Directed by
- Alan Taylor
- Written by
- David Chase & Lawrence Konner
- Released
- October 1, 2021 — theatrical and HBO Max, same day
- Runtime
- 120 min
- Budget
- ~$50 million
- Box office
- $13.1 million worldwide
- Rotten Tomatoes
- 72%
- Metacritic
- 61
- CinemaScore
- C+
The prequel: Newark in 1967 and the early 1970s, the riots, and the making of Tony Soprano — with Michael Gandolfini playing the role his father originated.
Cast¶
| Actor | Role |
|---|---|
| Alessandro Nivola | Dickie Moltisanti — Christopher's father |
| Michael Gandolfini | Teenage Tony Soprano |
| Leslie Odom Jr. | Harold McBrayer |
| Vera Farmiga | Livia Soprano |
| Jon Bernthal | Johnny Boy Soprano |
| Corey Stoll | Junior Soprano |
| Billy Magnussen | Paulie Walnuts |
| John Magaro | Silvio Dante |
| Ray Liotta | Aldo "Hollywood Dick" Moltisanti and Salvatore Moltisanti — twin brothers |
| Michela De Rossi | Giuseppina Moltisanti |
| Michael Imperioli | Narrator (as Christopher, from beyond) |
The film¶
The protagonist is Dickie Moltisanti — Christopher's father, referenced constantly in the series as a saint and a legend, and here revealed as neither. He is charming, violent, self-deceiving, and quite a lot like the man his nephew grows up to be.
Around him: the 1967 Newark riots and the collapse of the city; the fracturing partnership between the Italian mob and Harold McBrayer, a Black associate who builds his own operation; Dickie's father Hollywood Dick and his young Italian bride; and, at the edges, a teenage Tony who idolizes his uncle and is slowly being handed a worldview.
Christopher narrates — from the family plot, an inspired and slightly cruel choice given what Tony eventually does to him.
The framing thesis is that Tony's formation isn't one thing but a series of small withdrawals: a father in prison, a mother who cannot give affection, and the one adult who actually pays attention to him being a murderer.
What works¶
Alessandro Nivola carries it. Dickie is a genuinely good creation: a man performing generosity while being incapable of it.
Vera Farmiga's Livia is the film's best piece of connective tissue — not an impression of Nancy Marchand, but a recognizable earlier draft of the same person, and the film's funniest and bleakest scenes are hers.
Michael Gandolfini does something genuinely difficult with enormous restraint. He doesn't do his father's voice. What he does is the posture and the watchfulness, and there are two or three moments — a look across a room, the way he takes a seat — that land hard for anyone who has seen the series.
Ray Liotta plays twins and is excellent as both. It was one of his last performances; he died in May 2022.
What doesn't¶
It's structurally overloaded. The film is simultaneously a Dickie Moltisanti biography, a Newark riots drama, a Harold McBrayer story, and a Tony Soprano origin — and it has two hours. The McBrayer material in particular is the most interesting thread and the most starved.
Tony is a supporting character in his own prequel, which is defensible and also the reason a lot of the audience felt short-changed.
The explanation problem. The series' great strength was that Tony was never fully explicable. The film's job is to explain him. Even done well, that's a subtraction.
Manohla Dargis in The New York Times called it an unnecessary and disappointingly ordinary origin story. Richard Roeper called it a sharply honed, darkly funny companion piece. Both are defensible readings of the same film.
Commercial performance¶
It went out theatrically and on HBO Max simultaneously, in October 2021, in a market still deranged by the pandemic.
Theatrically it failed: $13.1M worldwide on a ~$50M budget, with a C+ CinemaScore — an unusually poor exit score, which generally reflects an audience that wanted something other than what it got.
On streaming it did well: over 1 million streams in the opening weekend and 2.1 million households within a month, and it produced a measurable spike in viewership of the original series, which is arguably what it was really for.
A sequel?¶
Chase has said he'd be interested in a follow-up covering Tony in his twenties, and Terence Winter has been publicly enthusiastic. Chase has also said the studio hasn't prioritized it.
Nothing has been produced. See After The Sopranos.
Is it canon?¶
Yes, in the sense that Chase co-wrote it and it doesn't contradict the series in any load-bearing way. It does fill in things the show deliberately left vague — how Dickie died, what Tony's childhood actually looked like, why Junior is the way he is — and whether that's a gift or a loss is a matter of taste.
The series works without it. It does not work without the series.