Though he’s made films for theatrical release and the occasional series for a different network or streamer, prolific documentarian Alex Gibney and the HBO nonfiction brand have become borderline synonymous over the past decade. It was almost inevitable that Gibney would, at some point, take the serpent’s tail into his mouth and make a documentary about HBO.
Gibney’s first stab at HBOuroboros is Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos, a documentary that is, per its title, completely self-explanatory. Simultaneously tracing the life of David Chase and the run of his game-changing mob dramedy, the two-parter is a must-watch for fans of The Sopranos — even television critics for whom many of its juiciest details are already established lore.
Especially in its 85-minute second part, which has to cover most of the Sopranos’ stretch after its first season, Wise Guys isn’t always as “definitive” as it wants to be, and Gibney forgoes a lot of context that he would never allow to be missing in a film about a weightier topic.
For all of its midsized gaps and failures of interrogation, though, Wise Guy represents Gibney at his most playfully engaged, with his fan’s enthusiasm yielding a doc that’s inquisitive and formally light on its feet throughout.
Gibney lays his cards on the table immediately, ushering Chase into an interview room decorated to resemble psychiatrist Jennifer Melfi’s (Lorraine Bracco) office from the show. Chase is immediately taken aback and only becomes more so after Gibney leads him through an initial round of conversation that resembles personal therapy more than an oral history of an Emmy-winning television series.
After talking about his New Jersey childhood and, naturally, his mother, Chase becomes wary.
“I really regret the amount of fucking verbiage from this morning,” he admits, in exactly the way that you would want the creator of The Sopranos to say he talked too much about himself.
Gibney reassures him, “Part of what interests me about The Sopranos was how it was personal to you.”
The director’s approach here is one of auteurist adulation. Sure, he’s assembled an assortment of talking heads to illustrate The Sopranos as a collaborative process, including HBO executives Chris Albrecht and Carolyn Strauss; veteran writer-producers Robin Green, Frank Renzulli and Terence Winter; plus much of the available cast, with archival interviews standing in for Nancy Marchand, Tony Sirico and, most particularly, James Gandolfini. Key plot points and perspectives are given proper attribution. But as Gibney traces the show, everything Sopranos ultimately comes from and through Chase — mostly for better, though, at certain high-pressure moments during its run, for worse.
The first section, at a brisk 75 minutes, is largely prelude. It covers Chase’s origins as a man and as a filmmaker (the footage from his Godard-infused thesis film The Rise and Fall of Bug Manousos is a treasure) and his slow rise through Hollywood, to the point in the ’90s at which he found himself a writer-producer on other people’s exceptional TV series, but with no single “created by” credit to define him. It proved to be the perfect intersection of artist and venue that Chase sat down with executives from HBO just as the premium cable giant was looking for a brand-defining drama (beyond Oz) to accompany The Larry Sanders Show and Sex and the City on its roster.
Gibney and Chase trace the evolution of the Sopranos pilot script, chronicle the arduous casting journey and, with assistance from ace cinematographer Alik Sakharov, explore the visual inspirations for the pilot, which steer’s the documentary’s look and feel as well. Gibney and editor Andy Grieve blur the lines between fiction and reality — whether they’re cutting between the series’ opening credits and Chase on his own New Jersey Turnpike drive, or between audition footage and the actual scenes that emerged from a process in which, almost everybody will agree, the right person was cast in just about every situation.
Sometimes Gibney wants viewers to draw connections between author and text. But sometimes he’s just having fun, like when he goes from Chase and Sakharov mocking traditional television filming “coverage” to a blink-and-you-miss-it assembly of ways Wise Guy might have been shot as a broadcast drama. The first section is a thoroughly entertaining mixture of biography, trivia and hagiography.
The second part — I’ll draw the line between them, even though HBO is airing both installments back-to-back and they play well together as a 160-minute feature — has a more difficult challenge. It has to cover nearly six seasons of The Sopranos — or seven, if you accept Chase’s contention that HBO split the sixth into two parts to avoid giving actors raises — in less than two hours, with an unavoidable awareness that stuff is guaranteed to be left out.
Finally, Gibney breaks away from nonstop Sopranos worship for secondhand memories of Gandolfini’s personal struggles on the series — the mixture of pressure and addiction — and Chase’s transition into some level of occasional tyranny. The talk about Gandolfini is inevitably marred by the actor’s inability to speak for himself, and the talk about Chase’s control issues inevitably marred by Gibney’s starry eyes. The Sopranos is on television’s Mount Rushmore, but some of its behind-the-scenes aspects would be described as borderline toxic for any lesser production. It would take literally nothing away from The Sopranos to ponder if, in addition to its creative legacy, it also established a template for permissiveness and deferential Great Man autocracy that might later be misapplied.
In approaching Wise Guy as an exploration driven by Sopranos love and not always a love for television as a whole, Gibney chooses to leave out most of the conversation about where the series fits into the continuum of the medium. It’s easier, in 160 minutes, to act like the TV antihero never existed before Tony Soprano, and like informed viewers are already aware of where the industry paradigm went after The Sopranos shifted it. Gibney keeps his perspective very much within the Sopranos bubble, presumably conscious if anybody wants the outside perspective of a TV critic or historian, Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall’s The Sopranos Sessions is available for purchase at your finer bookstores.
Lots of the things I wish Gibney had delved into are just a product of my desire for eight hours instead of three. I don’t think this doc is lesser for not discussing the opening credits and the choice of “Woke Up This Morning.” I’d rather hear Chase talk about the dream sequences, and how they relate to his own dream logic, and the open-ended nature of the finale, and those aspects are well covered. Could Gibney have delved into how 9/11 changed The Sopranos and its vision of America? Probably, but it isn’t necessary.
I loved a lot of the stories from the available stars — Bracco, Drea de Matteo, Steven Van Zandt and Edie Falco all have standout moments — and mostly didn’t miss the countless supporting actors who are missing. The absence of Jamie-Lynn Sigler and Robert Iler is more head-scratching. I obviously know nothing about Sigler’s health or either of their availabilities. But not having those two regulars, who grew up on the set and would have had a different relationship with Chase, the rest of the cast and the general industry at large, is a large gap, probably this project’s biggest.
It’s here that I could either keep working my way down my “Why didn’t Gibney include …” and “Why didn’t Gibney and Chase discuss …” checklists. Or I could leave it at this: Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos isn’t a be-all and end-all documentary, but it’s still an essential glimpse into an essential show through the eyes of its essential creative force.
