17. Family is a Sacred Institution
“If I want the excitement of Chinese food, I don’t need you to grant me permission.”
I’ve said before that doing a weekly rewatch of a show I’ve only ever binged seems to amplify my preexisting feelings about each installment, whether they’re positive or negative. But my season two rewatch is, so far, contradicting that hypothesis. I thought I loved this season (and I do love the big moments these episodes are driving toward), and felt like criticisms of it as one of the show’s lesser parts were overstated — but now, while waiting a week between each installment, I’m starting to agree.
These last three episodes have their moments (and they’re still better than most other TV) but they aren’t particularly exciting or well-paced. And “Commendatori” is the most forgettable of them by a wide margin. But, even though this run doesn’t live up to the potential that season one (mostly) realized, it’s also not the show at its worst. “Commendatori” isn’t even season two’s weakest. That honor goes to “D-Girl,” which suffers from the same problem: it features a fun, engaging story that exists within the show’s known universe, and a less-exciting one that’s only tangentially related to it.
This is all a roundabout way of saying that the Italy half of “Commendatori” is, frankly, a massive letdown. I like the brief glimpse of our fearless leader and noted undereye circle icon David Chase, as well as the economical State of the Character Arc address that takes shape in Christopher’s inability to execute on even the simplest goals. (His scramble to buy a gift for Adriana at the Newark duty-free is so, so dark.) And Paulie’s antics remind me of the proudly Irish-American kids I studied abroad with who were eternally getting dunked on by the Irish-Irish for trying to flaunt their ethnic authenticity by spending hundreds on claddagh rings and painting their faces for the St. Patrick’s Day parade. But I wish there were a meatier story attached to the comparison the episode draws out between the New Jersey crew and their Italian counterparts; it gestures toward but never fully comes up with a rearticulation of the idyllic mother-country hallucination Tony experiences in “Isabella.”
Yes, the New Jersey crew has strayed far from the homeland, but that isn’t necessarily a downgrade. Italy obviously has them beat on dining and scenery — the footage of New Jersey here looks like the part of Wisconsin I grew up in; atrophying industrial regions is the same — but it’s not as easy to make a straightforward case for the Italians’ social or professional superiority. At first glance, they seem classier: they dress better, have more refined palates, and are willing to respect a woman’s authority. But they’re often retrograde and inhumane. They’ll beat the shit out of a child in the street over a minor transgression; the reason they have a woman boss is that the men can’t stop murdering each other. And that woman boss is so superstitious she hoards her own toenails so that nobody uses them to cast a spell on her. (Semi-relatedly, if you’re interested in the contemporary condition of the mafia in Italy, I can’t recommend Alex Perry’s The Good Mothers enough.)
None of this flotsam and jetsam revealing the push and pull between progress and tradition that’s endemic to the generational immigrant experience add up to a cohesive theme or a compelling storyline. The only plot benefit of the Italy half of the episode is that it makes it comparatively obvious how much the New Jersey half of the episode owns. It’s basically the early-00s mob wife retelling of Kate Chopin’s “Story of an Hour,” as recounted by Angie Bonpensiero and re-lived by Carmela Soprano.
Early in the hour, Carm is pissed that Tony hasn’t invited her to Italy, and she cold-shoulders him before his departure and during every phone call they share while he’s abroad. But she has a perfectly decent time at home without him. Even though Angie’s threat of divorce throws her off balance, being without Tony affords Carm the time and energy she needs to engage in genuine, open moments with her friends — such as Angie’s admission that she hates her marriage and wants out. And, while it emerges during a contentious conversation, Carmela’s raucous laughter at Janice*’s defense of Richie Aprile is the most delighted we’ve seen her since Tony pranked Dr. Cusamano.
When Carm hears Tony return home, she lets disappointment wash over her for a few seconds before she slips back into her usual role and the guarded face that accompanies it. It’s a tiny moment, but it makes it clear that she didn’t want a vacation, not necessarily; she wanted a break from her regular life, possibly a permanent one. (The fact that her travel itch was apparently inspired by Barbara, of all people, seems telling.)
But she’s trying very hard not to know that, or at least not to examine that knowledge too closely— and Angie makes that difficult. Carmela’s efforts to talk her friend out of divorce feel both like an effort to talk herself into something, and a desperation to have others’ choices align with her own so fully that she doesn’t really have to think of them as choices at all, doesn’t have to confront the possibility that she could be living other lives. Her religious argument against divorce echoes Tony’s pseudo-ethical professional condemnation of informing, which he voices again here; both acts are, at their core, a refusal to entertain the possibility of the best road out of their current lives. At the surface, staying back in New Jersey seems to be the opposite of going to Europe — but, like the men, she’s ventured into a different, more expansive (though not necessarily better) world, and she’s disappointed to be returned to her regular one.
*I don’t know where else this might fit in, so I just have to say it now: I love alternate castings, and the ones for this show are a delight, because they nabbed every working Italian-American actor, so it’s just “what if [actor who played character x] played [character y.]” For example: David Chase originally wanted Little Steven to play Tony, because he initially imagined the show as “a live-action version of The Simpsons.” Michael Rispoli, who played Jackie Aprile, was also in the running for the role.
But maybe the wildest iteration of this is that Annabella Sciorra was offered the role Janice but turned it down, which I remembered in this moment because it’s one of only a few scenes where I can imagine that alternative being an improvement, mostly because a later scene between Sciorra and Edie Falco is one of my favorites in the series. I would have loved to see more moments between the two of them, but it’s almost impossible to imagine anyone but Aida Turturro as Janice and even harder to imagine anyone but Sciorra as Gloria Trillo.