We came to think we knew them like family - if a family was something always unsettling, held together by habit and fear and desperate wishful thinking. The comforting familiarity of a well-loved television presence became, in James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano, a play of beguiling masks luring us only deeper into indeterminacy. To be charmed by him (he made it easy) was to be conned, with a good chance he was equally duped by his own devices. Possibly he meant it wholeheartedly when he told Dr Melfi: “I’m a good guy basically… I love my family.” By the time we got to the end we had seen a thousand Tonys - sheepish, serpentine, commanding, calculating, lecherous, self-pitying, savagely sarcastic, tenderly paternal, fatuously self-pleased, teary-eyed over an old radio hit, racked by paranoid mistrust, exploding in feral rage - and seen one switch to another in an instant. Guileless self-revelation was not a possibility, least of all in a psychiatrist’s office. He had so many of him to choose from.
Geoffrey O’Brien (via blunderbussmag)
















