Livia Let DieLet her rest in one piece.
Posted Friday, March 2, 2001, at 8:30 PM ET
For a show about murderers, The Sopranos can sure bungle death. In this Sunday's season premiere, Livia Soprano, the bilious matriarch played by Nancy Marchand, finally draws her last breath. The character had originally been slated for an earlier passing, but the show's creators were reportedly so enchanted by Marchand's performance that they kept Livia alive and muttering. Sadly, Marchand, who suffered from cancer, passed away last June, leaving The Sopranos to begin its third season with a live character but a dead actor.
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StumbleUponTV protocol dictates that when an actor dies mid-plot-line, his or her character should suffer an untimely, offscreen death (see Hill Street Blues, Cheers, even Suddenly Susan). But before laying Livia to rest, The Sopranos performs a bizarre Frankensteinian experiment, using technological gimmicks to resurrect Nancy Marchand for one final confrontation between Livia and Tony.
Avert your eyes; the scene is excruciating to watch. The camerawork is convoluted, the rhythm jerky, and the intonations all wrong. James Gandolfini delivers his lines to Marchand's inert body double, whose hair and contours we see from behind. These shots alternate with lightning-quick snatches from Marchand's previous performances (reportedly drawn from 18 separate scenes). Livia's lines consist almost solely of her signature phrases: "Now look here, I don't like that kind of talk," "I wish the Lord would take me now," "I suppose I should just keep my mouth shut, like a mute," and so on. The show's writers were already abusing these refrains last season, but now Livia sounds like one of those dolls that repeats one of several alternating phrases each time you pull the cord in her back. Tony's lines are laboriously written around the slight non sequiturs that result. Worst of all, Marchand's head has been digitally grafted onto her body double's. Her head is cocked at an odd angle, and it's too small for the body to which it was attached.
David Chase, the series' creator, believes this ventriloquism was necessary. "Some people have never seen the show before," he told the Associated Press. "And for those people, they would say, 'what's this guy's problem with his mother?' " But Chase could have briefed the newcomers with a flashback; instead, he's created a scene that's a confusing letdown for his dedicated fan base. Tony has come to Livia to demand that she lie to the feds about a stolen airline ticket he'd given her and that she'd been arrested for using. The ticket is essential to the FBI's case against him, but the hasty encounter allows Tony only a token attempt at shutting his mother up. "What did you tell them when you were in the lockup?" he asks. Marchand doesn't have an answer—presumably there was nothing appropriate in the old footage—and Tony drops the question. "Fuck it, do what you want," he grumbles and strides away. Is the master of coercion giving up so soon? And come to think of it, why is Tony, who's hypervigilant about wiretaps, admitting at full volume that the tickets were stolen?
Soon afterward, Livia dies in her sleep, saving Tony from immediate prosecution and viewers from any more creepy cut-and-paste jobs. But the damage has been done. Replacing Nancy Marchand with a bunch of recycled, patched-together images is a ghastly anti-tribute to the great, lately departed actress. And Tony's final encounter with his mother, to which the series has been building since its start, is its sloppiest and least emotionally acute moment to date.
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Reader Comments From The Fray:
[Notes from the Fray Editor: Jodi, you told Sopranos lovers more than they wanted to know right then…and they're backatcha all over the place. The crack Fray team has invented a multiple-post-summarizer for this situation and it came up with this: "Sopranos spoiler, shame shame shame. Why would you do that?" A few people had other comments, and we particularly liked the reader (we're not naming her for her own protection) who said anyone who thought the character of Livia was exaggerated "should meet my mother-in-law".]
I agree with Culturebox. The posthumous Livia scene was strange and poorly done--very jarring in light of the excellent quality of the series.
By the way, speaking of Livia -- how about a piece on The Sopranos' debt to I Claudius (along with The Sopranos, the best two things ever on TV)? Livia Soprano is clearly based in large part on Livia, wife of Augustus--and there's a lot of other parallels between the scheming, murderous, but intriguing Romans and the scheming murderous, but intriguing Sopranos.
--Peter J
(To reply, click here.)
Hey, you, yeah,--you. Listen here. Watch your back. You want respect, you gotta give respect. You gotta respect the fan base of The Sopranos that has developed over time.
Look at it this way, we all want to see Nancy/Livia one more time. It is a human thing to do for a great character in a mob-based series. Drop the criticism of the scene and accept the tribute style scene. Now if Big Pussy had come back from the dead that would be a different thing.
--Brian
(To reply, click here.)
Bringing Nancy Marchand back from the dead for a guest appearance is the creepiest thing I have heard since I found out that Strom Thurmond was still alive.
When Ted Turner wanted to simply go back and add some color to old black and white movies, he aroused a typhoon of protest among purists. It is a measure of something in the zeitgeist that nothing stirs, no leaf turns in the wake of this new passage from live entertainment to mortuary headliners. Just a vague sigh of interest or dissatisfaction from the viewers.
I once had a conversation with Roger Ebert about inserting dead actors or computer replicants of same into live footage…I assured Roger that the promises of Artificial Intelligence would never be realized to the level of creating automatons convincing enough to displace the likes of talent like Adam Sandler or Pamela Sue Anderson. Now, Clint Eastwood is another matter: at this time there is no reason to believe a live actor played his role in Space Cowboys.
What is to stop the Democrats from bringing Gore back to life and staging an entire campaign for the Presidency with a ghoulish reconstruction of old performances manipulated by some cyber-Gepetto? What? You mean Gore is still alive?
Never mind.
--Zeitguy
(To reply, click here.)
(3/5)