Product Description
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Sopranos, The: The Complete First Season (DVD)
Meet Tony Soprano: your average, middle-aged businessman. Tony's
got a dutiful wife. A not-so-dutiful daughter. A son named
Anthony Jr. A pill of a mother. A hot-headed uncle. A
not-too-secret mistress. And a shrink to whom he tells all his
secrets, except the one she already knows: Tony's a mob boss. In
Season One, feeling his handle on his family and his business
slipping away, Tony (James Gandolfini) suffers a series of
anxiety attacks that land him in the office of a psychiatrist
(Lorraine Bracco). Opening up to his shrink, Tony relates the
details of his life as a 'waste-management consultant,' and tries
to come to terms with the professional and private strains that
have brought him to the brink of a breakdown. Co-starring Edie
Falco as his wife, Michael Imperioli as his nephew and Dominic
Chianese as his uncle.
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The Sopranos, writer-producer-director David Chase's
extraordinary television series, is nominally an urban gangster
drama, but its true impact strikes closer to home: Like 1999's
other screen touchstone, American Beauty, the HBO series
chronicles a dysfunctional, suburban American family in bold
. And for protagonist Tony Soprano, there's the added
complexity posed by heading twin families, his collegial mob clan
and his own, nouveau riche brood.
The series' brilliant first season is built around what Tony
learns when, whipsawed between those two worlds, he finds himself
plunged into depression and seeks psychotherapy--a gesture at
odds with his midlevel capo's machismo, yet instantly
recognizable as a modern emotional test. With analysis built into
the very spine of the show's elaborate episodic structure,
creator Chase and his formidable corps of directors, writers, and
actors weave an unpredictable series of parallel and intersecting
plot arcs that twist from tragedy to farce to social realism.
While creating for a smaller screen, they enjoy a far larger
canvas than a single movie would afford, and the results, like
the very best episodic television, attain a richness and
far closer to a novel than movies normally get.
Unlike Francis Cla's operatic dramatization of Mario Puzo's
Godher epic, The Sopranos sustains a poignant, even mundane
intimacy in its focus on Tony, brought to vivid life by James
Gandolfini's mercurial performance. Alternately seductive,
exasperated, fearful, and murderous, Gandolfini is utterly
convincing even when executing brutal shifts between domestic
comedy and dramatic violence. Both he and the superb team of
Italian-American actors recruited as his loyal (and, sometimes,
not-so-loyal) henchmen and their various "associates" make this
mob as credible as the evocative Bronx and New Jersey locations
where the episodes were filmed.
The first season's other life force is Livia Soprano, Tony's
monstrous, meddlesome mother. As Livia, the late Nancy Marchand
eclipses her long career of patrician performances to create an
indelibly earthy, calculating matriarch who shakes up both
families; Livia also serves as foil and rival to Tony's loyal,
usually level-headed wife, Carmela (Edie Falco). Lorraine Bracco
makes Tony's therapist, Dr. Melfi, a convincing confidante, by
turns "professional," perceptive, and sexy; the duo's therapeutic
relationship is also depicted with uncommon accuracy. Such grace
notes only enrich what's not merely an aesthetic high point for
commercial television, but an absorbing film masterwork that
deepens with subsequent screenings. --Sam Sutherland