Shtisel Season 3: The Last Shot

Ruchami dies.

***

Granted, she appears to live. Writers Ori Elon and Yehonatan Indursky know better than to drop an inescapably sad ending on a TV drama. TV is supposed to make the viewer feel good, reassured, in that comfortable stupor the passive apparently prefer. As do the advertisers.

My contention that she died provoked surprising anger. My arguments on Facebook’s “Shtisel Discussion Group” were met with some interest, less acceptance and a general reflex of rejection. Of course everyone wants her to live. How dare I kill her off!

The harshest response came from the then-director of the Shtisel Official website. Refusing to run my argument, she published a statement that Ruchami and her baby are definitely alive — an odd claim to make for any fictional characters. Indeed the widespread sense that these fictional characters are real people proved many viewers to be engaged with Shtisel on the level Malka is with her soap opera. The site director claimed the authority of the producers and the actress who played Ruchami. They say she lives therefore she lives. 

Of course, they are not the creators of this drama — the writers are. The writers constructed every detail. When the site director stated she had that information “from the writers” I called her on that. Again, she did not run my statement but said she’d withdrawn that claim. Still, she left her readers with that “information.” I was expelled from the group.

Of course, I have it from the writers that Ruchami died. No, neither told me. Even if I had that “inside” info from them I would not be ruled by it. For analyzing a work of art is not like solving a math problem. There is no “right answer” in the back of a book. Or what someone (even I) tells you.

Not even if it’s from the artist. As D.H. Lawrence reminded us, “Trust the art, not the artist.” For once an artist releases a work its meaning is out there for all to explore, define and respond to. There may well be depths and connections of which the artist herself may be unaware. The life is in the work. Any reading will be only as strong as the evidence from it supports. When I say “I have it from the writers” i mean I have it from the writing. The work is what they intended.

What they intended was a possibly ambiguous closure to the now three-season drama. There was the initial effect: the family gathers happily around Ruchami’s hospital bed, celebrating the baby, and Ruchami smiles and winks — at us. We can infer that against massive odds — 1,000 to one — Ruchami survived the delivery. Possibly because of her prayers, Hanina’s prayers and most graphically, Lippe’s prayers. That’s a happy ending — standard for standard TV fare. But that reflex conclusion flies in the face of almost everything that has come before.

For Shtisel is far from standard TV fare. It moves beyond the conventional domestic drama and aspires to a modern version of Classical Tragedy. Instead of the assuring pleasures of a comedy it plumbs the emotional depths of — in Ruchami — a modern tragic hero. I’ll explain how I get there. But for now note that it was my claim that Shtisel is such a profound, complex work — arguably unique in contemporary television — that disqualified me from the website supposedly created to support it.

One more prefatory thought. If one narrative strategy has distinguished Shtisel from its rivals it’s the faith in the spiritual life beyond our mundane one. That’s what the Haredi constant blessings and rituals reaffirm. The drama gives the varieties of spiritual existence the same material reality as its characters’ “real life.” We get dreams, artistic visions, re-livings of the past, visits from the dead. Even a conflation of life with TV : climactically, at the end of Season Two, when Malka — in the coma caused by son Shulem’s banning of her TV — watches her hospital room “real life” on a TV set in Heaven with her dead husband. The medium that Orthodox Shulem bans on earth is acceptable up there.  

In the beginning…. First episode, first scene (I,1). Normally a story begins by establishing the physical setting. The first season opened with a dream, the deli deep freeze of Akiva’s dead mother Dvora. Season Two opened with Shulem’s dream of comatose mother Malka. Season Three opens with Akiva’s visit from dead Libbi. There is no clue that Libbi is dead until art dealer Kaufman’s introduction. All these levels of spirituality are treated with the same realistic tone. As a consequence, we  have to pause at every scene to consider which reality applies. 

And so to that last shot.

***

The last scene opens on an ominous long shot through curtains to hospital staff and family around Ruchami’s bed. The scene then turns bright as the family celebrates little Hannahleh’s arrival. But the shot feels perhaps a little too cheery, indeed jarringly bright. Ruchami in particular looks too hearty. The unreal “feel” is confirmed when she smiles and winks at us. In real life we don’t smile and wink at someone in a different-reality audience out there. Her breaking the Fourth Wall shatters the realism. This is not Ruchami’s “real life.”

Confirming that break, the music connects the hospital scenes to the preceding uniting of the dead Shtisels with the living. There is no music in the “realistic” start to the scene, the three men talking. The music comes on with the I.B. Singer quotation and continues over the Ruchami scene.

The Singer quote establishes what the earlier seasons’ spiritual scenes have already demonstrated,  since I,i — that the dead stay with us, watching, helping, even visiting for a chat. We carry them within us. The music gives Ruchami’s last shot the same reality as the visiting dead. She’s visiting from the dead — as indeed all the earlier mothers here have done. 

Curiously, almost everyone online loves the Singer quote and the visible reunion with the dead— but forget it by the next scene.        

Earlier scenes support this reading. After hints that Ruchami’s condition requires a surrogate birth, the Episode 7 flashbacks make the previous dangerous pregnancy seem current with the present one. In both, the doctors say Ruchami must terminate the birth because of the 1,000 to one odds against her survival. The Torah prioritizes the mother’s life over the child’s, but Ruchami demands to continue. 

On the first pregnancy the infant is delivered dead. At his burial, Ruchami rejects Hanina’s comforting with “I’m in that box.” This is her Death-in-Life.

In her second pregnancy she generously forgoes the surrogacy, despite the rabbi’s permission, out of respect for Hanina’s religious concern. She lies to him and to Giti, preserving the illusion of surrogacy, so she can risk her life. She already proved a dab hand at situational ethics when — just after promising Yos’ale she’ll never lie to him again — she lied about her anti-Lippe posters.

When Hanina consults the Torah he takes his lesson from the rhyming odds. If 999 declare someone guilty and one innocent, the judgment goes to the innocent. This is  questionable advice. Determining innocence is not as drastic as risking life. Oddly, he’s persuaded to — Ruchami’s — gamble when he sees the old rabbi who’d suffered a serious accident. His prayers worked insofar as he survived but he’s in a severely reduced state, unable to continue his passion for Torah study. That prompts Hanina to drop his plan to marshal Ruchami’s parents against her plan.   

For Ruchami the long odds don’t matter. Rather than bet against them she accepts them. She prepares to die. When she wrote her “letters to my beloved little girl I will never give birth to” (III,2) she described the piercing black hole she felt inside: “This hole inside me is shaped like you.” The absent daughter was already a presence, as Ruchami’s absence will be. The paradox harkens back to Ruchami’s first touching line in I,1. As Lippe leaves for his Argentinian post Giti is tellingly silent, but Ruchami says “I miss you already.” He’s already absent while present.  Ruchami as parent will be present though absent later. She promises her unborn daughter she will always be with her, watching her, if but from “another room.” As the last dinner scene reminds us, motherhood doesn’t end at death. We see Dvora handing Akiva some challah. She has escaped the freeze that launched the drama.

When Hanina plays those tapes Ruchami, asleep beside him, seems already to be speaking from the dead. In any other drama this supernaturalism in a family drama might seem incongruousl. But in Shtisel her faith in a helpful afterlife coheres with the drama’s dominant theme of spiritual coexistences. 

Ruchami is not placing her faith in a miracle. She’s risking her life aware of its cost. Indeed any likelihood of a miracle may be undercut by the scene where Lippe, running to the hospital, prays for her survival. He begs God to take him instead. As if to reward him, when he falls he’s bathed in a celestial light. Aah, we may infer, “She’s safe. He’s going to Heaven so we’ll have her here.” But alas, the lights are from the truck he has stalled. So much for miracles.

That smile and wink express Ruchami’s triumph and satisfaction. She succeeded by sacrificing herself, correcting the privilege forced on her for the previous failed birth. She gets to “redo” that unfortunate earlier scene (which in a lower key Shira Levy wishes for her first meeting with Yosa’le). Now, if our reflex acceptance of her survival seems a happy ending, surely this ending provides a more profound satisfaction. How much more heroic a mother’s sacrifice for her child when she willingly pays with her own life. Accepting that high price for her commitment makes her a Tragic Hero of our time.

At least, this makes Ruchami a more ideal abstraction of Motherhood than Akiva’s painting at the end of Season 2, which drew Shulem into a lunatic violation of his wife’s desires one more time. In the guise of defending her honour he spoils her favourite son’s best painting. Worse, to buy it he sells the burial spot she on her deathbed begged for, so they would be  together in eternity. Shulem’s reconciliation with Akiva — and his response to Nuchem owning that prized burial spot — are ignored in this season. Except, perhaps, for Shulem’s marital advice to Akiva: “I’ve forgotten about [Dvora] completely.”

According the drama’s climax to Ruchami provides a radical shift away from the Shulem-Akiva axis on which the first two seasons pivoted. They played out Akiva’s and Shulem’s different responses to Dvora’s death. The shift of focus to Ruchami advances the next generation, in which women assume more authority. Hence the development of Yosa’le’s romance. Akiva’s conclusion with Racheli functions as a model for Hannahleh’s motherless future. 

We have watched Ruchami grow up, stretching the allowable limits to a proper end. She “nurses” her infant brother, explores secular literature (Anna Karenina, Middlemarch), and even — taboo — pretends to be a man (like George Eliot) when she writes her brothers letters putatively from Lippe. On his return she takes active measures to undermine him, but eventually hears him out and accepts him.  Her courage, character and maturity culminate in her willing sacrifice.   

Finally, consider the overall structure of the drama. Season 1 opens with Akiva’s dream of dead mother Dvora, and ends with Malka’s (equally “unreal” or “even more real”) view from Heaven. Season 2 starts with Shulem’s dream of comatose Malka’s advice and climaxes with his attack on Dvora’s memory (in its own way unmoored from reality). The Libbi-Akiva ending scene is a soothing epilogue. Season 3 starts with the dead Libbi’s very realistic scenes with Akiva and their baby. To cohere with this structure Season 3 also ends on a spiritual reality. All three seasons start with a mother speaking from beyond life-consciousness. One and three end with a dead mother; the middle season finds Shulem mad for acting against the will, values, spirit of his dead wife, i.e., failing in her absence,

In my Shtisel Discussion Group on Facebook several proponents of her survival declared themselves in “the life camp.” My alternative is not “the death camp.” Within the cosmos of this drama I am in “the afterlife camp.” The writers have made that reality a pervasive force in the drama. What’s radical in Ruchami’s faith is that she actually believes — and embraces — the spiritual afterlife that earthbound believers only mouth. However ardently. 

Why an ambivalent ending? Throughout Shtisel the writers have preferred a circumspect presentation of an issue rather than forcing us into one perspective. For example, we get no hints on when Ruchami and Hanina consummate their marriage. Nor on the resumption of Giti’s marital rights upon Lippe’s return. We’re pretty certain the Rebbetzin committed suicide — with Malka’s anti-Torah help — but no further mention of it is made. That saves us from having to make a moral judgment. Indeed there is a clear argument that Malka killed herself — following the Eskimo model Shulem mistakenly abuses in I,1 — but it’s not stated unequivocally either. We can infer whichever position suits our morality. So too regarding Ruchami’s suicidal maternity. 

My Ruchami ending has another advantage. Call it my Lekovid Covid Clause. In honour of covid. The drama was written, produced and aired during the pandemic. A crucial issue is the refusal of the orthodox of many faiths to accept the restrictions imposed by secular authorities for the public good. There have been protests, riots, closures — and many deaths and much more suffering as a result. That even beyond the offending communities. In this climate, basing a happy ending on prayer, on divine intervention, on the expectation of a miracle — is sadly dangerous. Giving Ruchami the heroic death she undertook is the most responsible as well as the happiest ending.    

***

I have written two books analyzing the themes and structure of each episode of Shtisel. Reading Shtisel covers the first two seasons. After Shtisel examines Season 3 and also the more political Israeli TV series the writers presented in the interim, Autonomies. Both books  are available from lulu.com. This discussion is a more extensive version than in my book, where I also presumed Ruchami to have died in childbirth. 

Ahed's Knee

The opening scene is a miniature of this powerful film’s strategy. An abstract image turns into the subjective view of (what turns out to be) a woman motorcycling to audition for a film role. But that unbroken movement turns out to be an outside perspective upon her. 

The ensuing narrative presents a left-wing Jewish filmmaker’s outrage at the repressiveness and cruelty of the Israeli government. The film ultimately detaches from that character’s rage and finds him self-destructive.

Most obviously, the director character Yud rails against Israeli censorship. The state won’t allow criticism or controversy, he insists. But this film itself — supported, financed, unimpeded by the Israeli government — destroys that claim. In that region Israel is the only state that would allow such commentary in the arts or on political platforms.

In his misplaced indignation Yud would destroy the career of the young culture officer who has been taking care of him. Her name, Yahalon (or Diamond) evokes her value and beauty, that he in his unfounded indignation would destroy. His name, Yud, the 10th letter in the Hebrew alphabet, denotes “god,” the creative power a director has over the film he’s making — but is hubristically doomed if he tries to assert it in real life.   

That this Yud does, disastrously, not just with Yahalon but in the anecdote he tells about  his having staged a mass suicide to test a new recruit. Over the course of the narrative the tormentor becomes the tormented. 

Yud’s rant against the Israeli government will find ready agreement among the Israeli and diaspora far-left and among the global sector that finds anti-Zionism a handy veil for their antisemitism. Whether they admit the film’s radical undermining of that position is another matter.

Yud suffers the PTSD of conflicted Israeli everyday life, not necessarily deriving from his Sinai service. He entered the army idealistically, hoping to become a warrior. He emerged coarsened, broken and extremist. Constantly under existential threat, Israelis live in intense polarization. 

Yud emerges as a case of arrested development. His imperviousness to Yahalon’s appeal may connect to his obsessive attention to his dying mother, to whom he obsessively sends messages. The death of his screenwriter mother may grow out of director Nadav Lapid’s own mother having died shortly after editing his Golden Bear feature Synonyms.  

So, too, the theme of an idealist turning sour recalls Lapid’s The Kindergarten Teacher and Policeman as well as Synonyms. Yud’s tirade ends in his helpless weeping. He’s exhausted by his own compulsive righteousness. 

Lapid provides a hopeful balance in the young girl, Yahalon's sister, who consoles Yud: “Don’t be angry. You are good.” (The girl's name is Hebrew for Narcissus,so she comes by her positivism naturally.) And “Do good and you will feel good.” Redemption lies in the recovery of humane connections, not in raging self-righteousness — at either end of the political spectrum.  Perhaps we can also take the girl's wording as addressed to a self-hating Jew. As in Synonyms, Lapid here may be dramatizing how a Jew can turn his criticism of the Jewish state into self-hatred. Thus so many Jews rail against Israel in defence of the movement intent upon destroying her.  

Yud survived the army and succeeded as a film director. But his rage disabled his changing with the times. Hence the references to his community’s loss of its excellent red pepper industry, destroyed by climate change and competition from Spain. The Israelis’ life under constant threat — from both outside and within — finds its humanity similarly at risk.

Typically, Israeli’s Left cinema anatomizes the nation’s mind and policy without openly defining the primary cause. Israel’s conduct is condemned without acknowledging the existential threat that provokes it. Lapid detaches from the far Left anger, though his irony may not stand up to the power of his central character’s rhetoric. 

The title? The actress of that opening shot is auditioning to play the Israeli demonstrator against the government who -- one official charges -- should be punished by the shattering of her knee. When Yud's attack upon bureaucracy leads him to destroy the meeting's organizer he over-reacts as viciously as the official who called for that punishment. When the narrative shifts completely from that project to its director character’s own disintegration the film equates the two violent extremes in Israeli politics, Left and Right. The joint isn’t jumping; it’s crumbling -- from within.

         The title also evokes Eric Rohmer's 1970 classic, Claire's Knee. One of the director's "Moral tales", the film details a man's whimsical fascination with a girl's knee. As Lapid abandons the knee plot to focus on Yud's obsessive, selfish and destructive politics the title allusion emphasizes his increasing distance from the civility, rationalism and life-force in the Rohmer film. 

 

No Time to Die

No Time to Die.

We/hero haven’t the time to die. We’re in a rush, to save humanity itself from a toxic threat (Think covid on steroids, plus blood-spurting). But under that threat, we will die in no time at all. Or this is not the time to die. No, it is time to die. For legends as for mortals.

A valedictory air hangs over this film, that concludes the Daniel Craig Bond-age. Retired from the Service, our James struggles to secure his new passion against the shadow of the old. Not just his past love-life but — it turns out — the new one’s  personal past.

An early festival celebrates the burning of old memories. We advance by respectfully setting aside those old hauntings. He and his current love both join in. At least, try. 

Bond’s current beauty is one Madeleine Swann — a double-barrelled summons to Proustian recollections of things past. 

But Madeleine proves suspect when Bond is bombed during his visit to his dead love Vesper’s grave. Did Madeleine set him up?  Is she the enemy, i.e., the reverse of Pussy Galore, the enemy Bond converted to Us Good by his sexual-cum-moral prowess? 

Relax, she herself is victim of the evil Specter she has struggled to survive since her own childhood trauma and loss. 

Not that retirement has softened the old warrior. Bond here is as physically sound (i.e., unbelievable) as ever. For all his advanced gadgetry, his various escapes and exertions show him more of a Wiley Coyote than a warrior. They start with him surviving a direct hit from a bomb — and grow from there. There is much running and jumping and little standing still. And if no man is an island, it will take the obliteration of one to get him.  

Bond’s enemy here is himself a cartoon figure, even in name: Lyutsifer Safin. A double-barrelled allusion himself, he’s a warped/misspelled Lucifer Satan. With spellcheck so neutralized, what hope Civilization? He makes the resurrected Lecter-like enemy Blofeld seem saintly.  

Bond enjoys a formal resurrection himself when the currently-designated 007 offers to restore his number. If Bond’s wake turns woke with the possibility this black woman might take over the genre, she proves way less effective than the beautiful young white Paloma. Superman may have sired a gay superson but the Bond family business is likelier to pass to a white gal.

And guess to whom? As the film opens on the burning of memories, it ends on the  start of a story. Madeleine is telling her stoic infant daughter: “Once upon a time there was a man. His name was Bond. James Bond.” This kid has survived a catastrophe even worse than the one her mother did. She bore up —personfully — herself. When Paloma outshines the 007-temp she may be clearing the way for James Bond’s longtime lover’s daughter. As Mom admits, the gal has James’s eyes. Yathink….?   

    This blue eyed savior evokes another classic. That is the real classic: Renoir's Le grand illusion. As the two comradely foes strike out to their likely tragic ends, the generals' frozen humanity is countered by the French farmer: Marie has blue eyes. theimage treasures human connection over the cold hands of political war.

The Marx Brothers -- an artistic construct

The Marx Brothers were a prominent US comedy act from 1905 to 1949. They moved their act from vaudeville to films in 1929, going on to make 12 features, mainly surrealist parodies of popular genres. Groucho managed a solo afterlife on TV, where their films still enjoy the immortality of the rerun.

Audiences loved the films’ unprecedented wildnessas they deflated social conventions. In that sprit we suspend any moral judgment of their uniformly self-serving and larcenous conduct. 

Their films grew more sophisticated and witty, especially when S.J. Perelman joined their writing team. When Martin Esslin defined the Theatre of the Absurd he included the brothers as an early exemplar. The collective could equally have served Colin Wilson’s definition of The Outsider.

The Marxes usually feel Jewish, as in Captain Spaulding’s lyric aside: “Did someone call me schnorrer”? But their Italian stage names broaden their meaning to The Immigrant. The Marx Brothers make comedy out of the immigrant’s ambivalent experience of their new America.   

Their meaning can be read from several spectra. Perhaps the most telling range is their different use of language. Groucho’s fluency shows him the most assimilated. But he overflows the cliches he deploys, with his brash insults. In his asides to the audience he refuses to stay within his role, even as — or because he has — made it into the new world.

For he often plays a character of substance and station  — a however shyster lawyer, a famous explorer, a college president. But he refuses to conform to that respectability, to play the game. Instead he destroys decorum with his insulting candour and unrestrained chatter. His courtship of Margaret Dumont is a verbal assault on a social monument. Hence his classic: “I would never join any club that would have someone like me as a member.”

Chico’s speech is pure immigrant, with his American/Italian English. As the scripts grew wittier his malapropisms grow insightful. His “A circus got plenty relephants” could summarize the brothers’ film canon, to which indeed the circus is plenty relevant in its three-ring mix of genre plot, romance and comedy. As kindred aliens, Chico often serves to translate Harpo to Groucho.

Harpo famously doesn’t speak (hence/contra the title of his memoir). He is thus a pre-civilized force. With the most expressive face, he shows the widest gamut of extreme emotions, from glee to rage. Instinctively dishonest, he is the most honest in his emotions. He is the least socialized.

So too the spectrum of appearance. Groucho honestly flaunts his falsehood with his shoe-polish moustache. His suit is a variation on Chaplin’s Little Tramp: the baggy pants, the incongruous dinner jacket. Both suits express social aspiration. The firmly immigrant Chico wears a constant cap and a tight jacket, always buttoned, emblems of constraint. 

But Harpo is again that pre-civilized force. His clothes are the looser antithesis to Chico’s, especially his abundant overcoat with preternatural pockets. From them — and his pants — he can pull any object he happens to need — even a blowtorch in full blaze. 

So too the characters’ movement. Groucho’s slinking, crouching walk is an image of subversion, of an undermining. The feral Harpo’s reflexive girl-chasing make his unbridled energy seem demonic. Harpo would be the pure, unsocialized Id — but his saving grace is his warmth and delicacy, 

And his angelic harp playing. This contrasts to Groucho’s verbal music — the satiric songs he croaks — which extends his irreverence. Chico’s piano-playing is characterized by his fingering — as idiosyncratic as his language —especially when he shoots a note with his pistol finger. That encapsulates the brothers’ aggression against all convention. 

Taken together, the three brothers define a range of Outsiderhood in America. This is confirmed by the brief tenure of brother Zeppo. He was reputedly the funniest brother. In their vaudeville years he would fill in for whoever couldn’t make it. But he was too clearly the successful American, too good-looking, with too good a singing voice, to suit their Outsider spectrum. He was replaced by other B-actors.

The Marx Brothers’ influence goes far beyond the sprouting of other comedy Brother acts, from the Ritz and Smothers to the Smith. From the Marx headwater flows the century of Jewish Outsider critics of America and the larger culture, especially through parody: Mickey Katz, Alan Sherman, Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, Joan Rivers, Sarah Silverman — and on to Mad Magazine and SNL. Ironically, as the Marxes find comedy in the outsider perspective on America they helped America become — at least in self-aware laughter — a little Jewish.   

  

Night Raiders

  Finally, “Canadian apocalypse” is no longer a contradiction in terms. 

Legendarily “nice” Canadians at last have a narrative feature film that exposes our  dystopian present. 

More specifically, it pretends to a near-term dystopian future that amplifies our really dystopian past. 

The specific target is the cultural genocide that the Canadian federal government, abetted by the Catholic church, attempted upon our indigenous population. That is a real horror, for which the native Canadians continue to pay, while the church finds devious ways not to. 

The government spews promises and backtracks. The Prime Minister declared a National Reconciliation Day, then for that event spurned native invitations, opting for a family holiday in the mountains instead.

In writer-director Ms Danis Goulet’s effective thriller, an impersonal police state separates native children from their parents and weaponizes them to keep order. 

But here native mythology triumphs over high-tech weaponry. A battalion of precision-firing drones turn into a horde of mosquitoes that serve the heroine’s daughter’s will. Thus the native elder’s opening vision triumphs over the supposedly superior white man’s science.

Wishful though the end might be, the film presents a fair extrapolation of Canada’s First Nations’ experience. At least the persecution part, the attempted genocide. The central mother/daughter relationship wins out, in contrast to another one, in which a woman’s son has been brainwashed to the point of killing her. 

The natives initially thought their predicted saviour “from the North” was the mother. When it turns out to be the daughter instead, the film tacitly places its faith in the future generations to campaign for and to achieve a justice and humanity so far denied them. Broadening the context, a distant cry of "I can't breathe" evokes the George Floyd incident.

The film has been wildly misrepresented. It lacks the imaginary projected science to qualify as “sci fi” and the supernatural to be a “horror.” Basically, it’s an impassioned First Nations political film disguised as thriller. If it heartens and mobilizes the First Nations it will have worked. 

Ironically, many Canadian small-L liberals who are rightly infuriated by the Canadian government’s abuse of its native children have no problem avidly supporting the Palestinians even as they make their own pre-teen children soldiers, shields, martyrs, confident that the world will blame Israel for their deaths. The Left does. 

Even as the Palestinians set random fire to Israeli forests Canada’s Green Party almost broke up in its eagerness to support them. Politics is rarely rational on either side.   

 

The Many Saints of Newark

  Let sleeping gods lie, someone might have advised David Chase. His brilliant Sopranos series so towers over the American cultural landscape that any sequel, prequel or interstitial parallel could only fall short of expectations. 

Too bad, because Chase must have some brilliant feature films inside that we would be privileged to visit. He needs only the courage to break new ground. His Not Fade Away (2012) was far better than credited. 

The current prequel likely frustrates everyone’s expectations. Too bad, because in itself it’s a very good Family family film. Trouble is, the echoes of the series inhibit our engagement with this film. We look for anticipations of the story we know — which Chase sets us up to do. That compromises our regard for the present structure. 

Still, this is an engaging drama about the American dream and its compromises. As Ray Liotta (trailing clouds of Goodfellas glory) plays both Dickie Moltisanti and his jailed twin brother, he embodies the twin poles of violent corruption and spiritual regeneration  — but both are murderers. That’s America’s primordial stain.

The newly Buddhist Moltisanti brother apart, the closest to any moral code here is the priest at the wedding, a pallid simp paid token apologies in simulated respect.

When Dickie’s new stepmother — soon to become his goomba — is imported from Italy she personifies the lost values of the American Dream. She comes to the promise of freedom only to find herself maritally enslaved and mortally violated.

Her drowning grows out of this film’s major addition to the Sopranos lore: the cost to America of its racism. The TV series touched on African American crime only in passing, with a compromised African American community leader. The film expands upon that, harping on the Italians’ disdain for the Blacks, which leads to Dickie killing his contaminated beloved. This is the BLM inflection of the saga. 

The film opens on the family cemetery and closes where the TV show starts -- on that hypnotic Journey song. In the body the most thematic pop lyrics are the — of course Sinatra — song that asks whatever happened to Christmas, whatever happened to you? 

That is, whatever happened to America and its global promise of freedom and democracy? In this drama what happened was America’s refusal to abandon its murderous white supremacism. The plantation mentality turned slavery into the nation’s suicide.  

For a crash course on the TV drama to prepare for this feature, look for my episode by episode analysis, The Sopranos on the Couch: Ultimate Edition (out of print but available on Abebooks) and The Sopranos: Season 7 (lulu.com). That’s a lot quicker than running all the shows — though less fun.