The Many Saints of Newark is a prequel to the Sopranos TV Show. I’ve never watched the Sopranos. I don’t think there’s a way to talk about this movie without spoiling it.
To be honest, I’m not entirely sure I followed the plot. Part of that was not being familiar with the show, but a big part of it was the movie doesn’t really care if you follow it or not. Many important conversations take place in hushed whispers or in incredibly loud places like right by the ocean.
Anyway, a young Tony Soprano (young Tony played by William Ludwig, Teenage Tony played by Michael Gandolfini) lives in Newark, New Jersey in the 1960s. His dad Johnny Soprano (Jon Bernthal) works for the mafia as well as his “uncle” Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola). His dad and his uncle both seem to work for the same family but they also both seem to be the boss? It’s not very clear. Johnny gets arrested by the police and has to go to jail for a few years while Tony is still a kid. While Johnny is in jail, Tony gets closer to Dickie.
When Johnny finally gets out of jail, Tony is now a teenager. He’s getting in trouble at school doing things like running a Numbers game in school and stealing ice cream trucks. Johnny hopes he can go on to be a football player, but doesn’t really seem to think he’s got the talent for it. Dickie is unsure – on the one hand, he wants Tony to live a straight life but on the other, he thinks he’d make a great mobster.
The majority of the movie takes place during the 1967 Newark race riots. Harold McBrayer (Leslie Odom Jr.) was a collector of the Numbers game for Dickie throughout Newark. But after he sees the riots and listens to a Black Power speech, he decides he’s going to start his own Numbers racket in the Central Ward of Newark. He quits working for Dickie and begins his own collections, which starts an all-out war between his and Dickie’s gang.
Eventually, Dickie tries to distance himself from Tony, to discourage him from going into the life. But after all the murders from the gang war, it seems inevitable that Tony will become a gangster.
If the movie is supposed to be some sort of comment on race and gender in the 1960s or in mob movies it doesn’t really work. We understand why Harold is motivated to become his own gang boss, but we don’t really spend enough time with him to flesh out his story. Similarly, there is a B story about Dickie’s girlfriend who wants to open her own hair salon. But he just wants to pay for her life so she can always be around to take care of him. They make her sympathetic, but the end of her story doesn’t seem empowering at all.
A main theme of the movie is that even bad people can do good things. I’m not sure if that is one of the main themes of the show, but it again doesn’t really work in the movie. The immoral characters do some good deeds, but no good deed they do leaves a lasting impact the way their bad deeds do. Maybe that was the point?
There are a lot of great actors in this movie, but they can’t save it. Maybe if this was a mini-series it would make more sense, because there are a lot of things that seem to be hinted at and then never mentioned again. It feels like it was cut down from a much longer script and maybe that’s why it is hard to follow what’s going on and the characters seem underdeveloped.
The movie just never really answered the question of how and why Tony Soprano became a mobster. And when much better mob origin stories like the Godfather: Part II and Goodfellas exist, this movie just feels lacking.
I’m rating this an HBO Now. Maybe if you’re a big fan of the Sopranos, seeing younger versions of the characters and catching the nods to the show may be enough to make it worth your time. For anyone who’s never watched the Sopranos, don’t start with this movie.