Not even close on the Sopranos.
Joanne Weintraub in this morning's Journal-Sentinel thinks the ending was "sweet," although she acknowledges that a less benign interpretation is possible.
The ending was, in fact, both sweet and ominous. Does Tony look up to see his daughter or a hit man? Does he see anything at all or has he wound up like Phil Leotardo whose last vision is of his wife and grandchildren before he is shot in the head by an assailant that he never sees? (Jim Rowen reminds us that Bobby said "you probaby never hear it when it happens" although Bobby certainly did.)
Of course, we get no answer but maybe we don't need one. It could have been Meadow this time. What about the next? Will it be murderous rivals? Will it be the feds? And even if it isn't, will he wind up like Junior unable to remember any of it? Will it all turn out to be, as his mother said, a big nothing. Can he do anything but focus on the good times for which he has paid so dearly?
2 comments:
The Sopranos finale was no finale at all. It reminded me when I had dated and was led along to think something big was going to happen and then got the goodbye, never going to see you again.
After 9 years they should have given us the conclusion and not the guess work. Perhaps there leaving the door open for something more in the future.
I actually thought it was fantastic. Any other ending would have been cheap or resulted in 50% of the viewers boasting that they correctly predicted the outcome. My thought at the beginning of the season was that A.J. was going to off Tony in a sort of Oedipal conflict. He would finish what Tony's mother and father could not do.
The interesting thing about the Sopranos has always been the conflict between Tony's brutality and his attempts to maintain some level of humanity (although at the end, it was questionable whether that was what he was really doing in therapy). Other than Tony, all of the other family members were content to reap the benefits of Tony's brutality, but they stuck their head in the sand to avoid the terrible truth about how they got their SUVs and Beamers.
Here we end with the family knowing that their closest friends were assassinated, there were direct threats to their own lives, and they end up eating onion rings in a diner while Meadow struggles to parallel park. Were they all obliterated while the screen went black? Who knows? Would we have preferred for Meadow to walk in just in time to see her family blown away? I don't think so. We sure the heck wouldn't continue to keep talking about it past an hour or two if that had happened though..
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