MULTIZ321
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A Tribute to Edie Falco as Carmela Soprano
By Lizzie Fiedelson/ Culture/ Culture Desk/ The New Yorker/ newyorker.com
"When Edie Falco discusses her relationship with James Gandolfini, with whom she created one of the most complex and moving portraits of marriage ever shown on television, she sometimes admits that the two didn’t know each other very well. She recently told the “Today” show that, during the eight years in which they filmed “The Sopranos,” they never got close. “I really did not know much about his personal life,” she said, “just what the rest of the world knew.” On one level, this distance is surprising, but, on another, it makes a kind of emotional sense. Falco’s performance as Carmela Soprano, the sharp, bejewelled wife of the mobster Tony Soprano, had a wholeness and an independence to it; it was never defined by Gandolfini and her other scene partners, however excellent they were. Especially when crying, Falco was virtuosic. I recently rewatched “The Sopranos”—as many fans were inspired to do as the show marked its twentieth anniversary, this January—and I was struck again by Falco’s ability to make herself, through fleeting expressions of sentimental piety or grief, the linchpin of the show’s explorations of moral frailty.
Carmela is also just such a great character. Some of her best moments come when she is expressing bemusement: a wide-eyed face of surprise that she makes when life just doesn’t turn out her way—when her crush Furio doesn’t come in for coffee, or when she hears on the phone that Adriana has suddenly left Christopher, Carmela’s distant cousin, whom she'd been planning to marry. (In fact, Tony has had Adriana whacked, for being an F.B.I. informant; Carmela suspects this and dreams about Adriana throughout the rest of the show.) Carmela could be both tactful and tacky, and her insights about other people—such as a flirty priest who chases the “whiff of sexuality” through overinvolved emotional relationships with parish housewives, Carmela included—coexist with severe blind spots about morality and judgement...."
As Carmela Soprano, Edie Falco perfectly captured the series’ contradictions and moral flaws.
Photograph from Alamy
Richard
By Lizzie Fiedelson/ Culture/ Culture Desk/ The New Yorker/ newyorker.com
"When Edie Falco discusses her relationship with James Gandolfini, with whom she created one of the most complex and moving portraits of marriage ever shown on television, she sometimes admits that the two didn’t know each other very well. She recently told the “Today” show that, during the eight years in which they filmed “The Sopranos,” they never got close. “I really did not know much about his personal life,” she said, “just what the rest of the world knew.” On one level, this distance is surprising, but, on another, it makes a kind of emotional sense. Falco’s performance as Carmela Soprano, the sharp, bejewelled wife of the mobster Tony Soprano, had a wholeness and an independence to it; it was never defined by Gandolfini and her other scene partners, however excellent they were. Especially when crying, Falco was virtuosic. I recently rewatched “The Sopranos”—as many fans were inspired to do as the show marked its twentieth anniversary, this January—and I was struck again by Falco’s ability to make herself, through fleeting expressions of sentimental piety or grief, the linchpin of the show’s explorations of moral frailty.
Carmela is also just such a great character. Some of her best moments come when she is expressing bemusement: a wide-eyed face of surprise that she makes when life just doesn’t turn out her way—when her crush Furio doesn’t come in for coffee, or when she hears on the phone that Adriana has suddenly left Christopher, Carmela’s distant cousin, whom she'd been planning to marry. (In fact, Tony has had Adriana whacked, for being an F.B.I. informant; Carmela suspects this and dreams about Adriana throughout the rest of the show.) Carmela could be both tactful and tacky, and her insights about other people—such as a flirty priest who chases the “whiff of sexuality” through overinvolved emotional relationships with parish housewives, Carmela included—coexist with severe blind spots about morality and judgement...."
As Carmela Soprano, Edie Falco perfectly captured the series’ contradictions and moral flaws.
Photograph from Alamy
Richard
