Alex Gibney directs a documentary about the network’s classic crime drama and its creator.
“Go into the ham!” cried Livia Soprano, disinclined to enter a nursing home. “And take the carving knife and stab me here, here, now, please! It would hurt me less than what you just said.” Yes, “ham” was a great touch. But the point was, whenever Tony Soprano said, “I swear on my mother,” viewers knew it was a loaded statement.
Mom is a standard area of conflict in psychiatry, but she provides just one angle of approach for director Alex Gibney in “Wise Guy: David Chase and ‘The Sopranos’” as he puts the creator of the classic mob series on the couch (chair, actually). Using a mock-up of Dr. Melfi’s office, where Lorraine Bracco analyzed James Gandolfini for six seasons, the Oscar-winning documentarian grills the fabled writer-producer, who says, yes, he agreed to be in a “Sopranos” project, but “I didn’t realize it was going to be about me.” It isn’t, entirely. “Wise Guy” is also a making-of film, a nostalgic trip back to a turning point in television and a collection of intimate interviews with the people who were either in the series or made it happen. “The one thing we had in common,” Terence Winter says of the “Sopranos” writers, “we all had the same mom.” Dr. Gibney practices a scatter-gun approach to Freudian analysis.
While concentrating on Mr. Chase, “Wise Guy” also surveys the state of television at the time “The Sopranos” made its debut in 1999, and the state of HBO. “It was the bargain basement of TV, to be honest,” says Michael Imperioli, who played Tony’s protégé Christopher for the entirety of the show but hadn’t taken it seriously at first. Few had. “I thought it was about opera singers,” says Drea de Matteo, who auditioned for multiple roles but ended up playing Christopher’s girlfriend, Adriana.