Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos
Directed by Alex Gibney
Unrated
Runtime: 160 minutes
Airs in two parts on HBO on September 7

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

You can usually tell when a documentarian didn't get what they wanted, when a subject didn't deliver or a premise didn't yield the results they'd hoped it would. When director Alex Gibney had his crew reconstruct Dr. Melfi's office, one of The Sopranos' most iconic sets, for his interview with that show's creator, David Chase, it must have been clear to everybody that he intended to probe one of television's most revered minds. And when, less than ten minutes into a nearly three-hour-long series, Chase complains, with some humor but mostly bemusement, that he's fine talking about his show but has no interest in delving into his personal life, it's clear to everybody that Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos is going to touch on the David Chase of it all as little as its subject can manage. What's left is fun, but a little breezy compared to what you and, perhaps, Gibney had wanted.

I'm not discounting fun. Wise Guy is split into two episodes, the first covering Chase's early career and the first season of The Sopranos, the second reflecting on the rest of the show's run, its critical success and its continually controversial ending. It's captivating to hear behind-the-scenes anecdotes from most of the biggest names of the cast and see footage of promotional events where hundreds of Italian-Americans from New Jersey showed up to an open casting call in a parking lot. I'll watch a clip of Tony yelling "I know seniors who are inspired" at Livia ten times in a row. I may have wanted to learn Chase discuss his personal thoughts on his art, and that may have been what it seemed like I was going to get, but I was hardly annoyed hearing stories about Tony Sirico (Paulie Walnuts) and his fanatical devotion to keeping his hair perfect.

Besides Dr. Melfi's office, where Lorraine Braco's Melfi and James Gandolfini's Tony Soprano met for often volatile therapy sessions, Gibney recreates The Sopranos' opening credits, editing in new footage so that David Chase is riding shotgun with his most famous character, a depressed mob boss who left a little dirt on everything he touched. Chase created Tony to explore the world of New Jersey organized crime that he grew up near and as a vehicle to express his own feelings about his mother, who explicitly inspired Nancy Marchand's character, Livia Soprano.

Wise Guy is not the first time Chase has admitted to the connection between his relationship with his mother and Tony's relationship with Livia, but it's still a wild thing to let the world know. Livia was manipulative, harsh, cruel. She knowingly gave other people reasons to kill her son. Chase says he originally intended Tony to murder Livia at the end of his show's first season, only sparing the character as a favor to an ailing Marchand. Tony was a monster, but he had enough charisma that you occasionally fell under his spell, whereas Livia, no matter how incredible Marchand was as an actor, always seemed contemptible.

And so it's equally wild that Chase would openly discuss transposing such dark, ugly elements of his life onto his art as it is that he'd be so unwilling to dig into the rest of his life. It's like admitting to murder but refusing to disclose what you ate for dinner. Here's what I knew of his life before sitting down with Wise Guy: Chase grew up in New Jersey, moved to California to direct movies but wound up writing and hating network TV. He created and ran The Sopranos, directed one film (the underrated Not Fade Away) and co-wrote another (the Sopranos prequel The Many Saints of Newark, which I also liked). Somewhere along the way, he tried to make another show for HBO, but they wouldn't give him a decent budget.

I don't know how somebody so revered can be responsible for so little work, especially if that isn't a deliberate decision. That Chase is famously press-averse means we have even less insight into the gaps in his resume than we normally would. He wanted to make more things but hasn't, even as new generations routinely rip The Sopranos off and make entire careers out of watered-down versions of a framework he helped create. Max Landis has made as many TV shows and written three times as many produced screenplays as David Chase. How does that happen?

Late in The Sopranos, Tony muses on nostalgia, telling another character "'Remember when' is the lowest form of conversation." Watching Chase squirm in his talk with Gibney, it's clear he feels similarly. If you have questions about his creative life, questions like the one I just posed, you won't get answers. I now know he wrote for a Bill Bixby crime drama called The Magician, about a stage illusionist who used his tricks in his side job as a detective, but that's about as deep as Chase will let anybody get.

As The Sopranos itself comes clearer into view and Wise Guy brings in more interview subjects, there are people to make up for Chase's taciturn nature. HBO execs talk about the moment in the 90s when scripted programming like Oz and Sex and the City changed their network from a place you could watch movies and boxing to a home for risky programming networks wouldn't or couldn't produce. Michael Imperioli remembers HBO as the "bargain basement" of television around the time he auditioned to play Christopher Moltisanti. Years later, when The Sopranos has been hailed as the best thing on TV and HBO has become established as the only channel that matters, Drea de Matteo struggles with her character, Adriana La Cerva, getting killed, which meant having to leave the best job she'd had. Everything in between those points is at least interesting if you loved The Sopranos and want to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time. It came from a TV writer who hated TV, starred character actors without much mainstream recognition, aired on a channel with few scripted programs and changed how television looks and feels.

So much of the show speaks to our current moment, if you can excuse the hackneyed insight. The idea of "coming in too late" feels more profound the older I get and the more I'm ground down by the world. In one of the few moments he opens up about his motivations with The Sopranos' themes, Chase talks about his show as a comment on capitalism, which is both obvious and fascinating, given it connected with however many millions of people who would never be able to think about anything in those terms. It's an immense skill to be able to get that many people to engage with something so emotionally complex.

Halfway through Wise Guy’s second episode, Gibney look into Gandolfini's complicated life. He was extremely generous, giving $30,000 each to most members of the cast and crew after he renegotiated his HBO contract, but he'd also disappear from set every once in a while. The character's destructive nature took a toll on him. He was playing a character David Chase literally calls "the devil” and to prepare for violent scenes, he'd put rocks in his shoes and deprive himself of sleep, sometimes downing six cups of coffee to get on edge. He'd punch the inside of a car until his knuckles bled. Outside all of this, he was abusing alcohol. Gandolfini’s death hurts for any number of reasons, primarily because he left behind a family and because he seemed like a sincerely good person. Way down that list, I just want to see more James Gandolfini’s performances, and I wish he could look back from 2024 on his work and tell us about it.

I’m curious about his relationship with Chase. They loved each other but Chase was demanding and Gandolfini went through unpredictable periods. Writers came and went as Chase both hired more people and became more exacting in his pursuit of his vision, but Gandolfini was one of the few people involved in every episode of the show. He couldn’t leave. The few times Chase gets emotional here, he’s discussing Gandolfini, though his guard remains as high up as he can bear to hold it. You want to see these two in a room together, two strong-willed people who would cave for each other in the right circumstances.

The last scene of the show is discussed without being fully explicated. Bracco mentions that she was with Gandolfini when he saw it and he was as confused as anybody. It's probably the most satisfying analysis of one of the most famous TV sequences of all time. My take, after watching this film, is that, outside of any philosophical meaning in the show itself, it was a way for Chase to take some of the show back for himself. It was his brain on display more than it was anybody's, but he seems to have become worried that it wasn't. He let everybody else in, and a private mind can crave solitude. Whatever you think the end of The Sopranos means, Gibney makes it clear here that Chase is the only person who definitively knows. I think it’s a smart ending, but I also think Chase was hungry to own his story again.

Not Fade Away is mentioned in passing, the next two decades of Chase's life skipped over in service of Gibney giving the doc a meta ending referencing that cut to black. And Chase is still the only person who knows what he meant by it, even as Gibney references and plays with it. As a documentary, Wise Guys is interesting, if not revelatory. And Gibney’s made revelatory work— The Armstrong Lie is as penetrating a documentary portrait as you can make. Still, maybe that in itself is revelatory. Maybe it’s a 160 minute-long assertion that David Chase isn’t much interested in talking.