Directed by the great Alex Gibney (The Inventor, Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) and divided into two distinct parts, Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos is the story of how an unassuming guy from New Jersey created one of the most important television series in broadcast history (or more precisely, cable history, since the show was released on HBO, as is this doc).
Marking the 25th anniversary of the show’s debut, the director and his team rebuilt the therapy offices of Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco, probably the highest profile actor on the show at the time of its debut because of her work in Goodfellas) and sat Chase down for an epic interview, during which he explains the parallels between the world he grew up in and the series, beginning with his eccentric and likely mentally ill mother.
Over the course of just under three hours, we walk through Chase’s childhood, his television career prior to The Sopranos, and the meteoric rise to success the show experienced almost immediately thanks to unlikely protagonists. The film also addresses the care with which Chase took to create not just interesting characters but daring to dive into their psyches and various deals with the devil that those not in the New Jersey mafia made to benefit from its existence. Ever the reluctant subject, Chase nevertheless is open and honest in his “sessions” with Gibney about every aspect of the show, including casting, what a taskmaster he could be, and how often he borrowed from classic cinema to do everything in his power to make the series not feel like television (although he only directed the first and last episode of the show).
We also get interviews with Bracco, Edie Falco, Michael Imperioli, Drea de Matteo, Steve Van Zandt, as well as a handful of writers, technical team members (director of photography Alik Sakharov is especially insightful). And HBO execs are interviewed at length to dig into the challenges of the show at its beginning as well as after it became a success. But the most interesting conversations are with Chase about his complicated working relationship with star James Gandolfini (who died in 2013 at age 51), who had always had issues (personal and professional) playing this character and how dark he needed to take his mind to play mob boss Tony Soprano.
Chase also gets reflective about the unenviable task of killing off beloved characters or writing real people from his life into the characters on the show. The first part of the documentary is the buildup of the show’s popularity through the first season, with the second half focusing on the perils of fame and success (“Now you’re a brand,” someone tells Chase), and how everything stems from Chase wanting to direct movies since he was in his 20s.
The standard-issue behind-the-scenes footage and archival interviews are enough to warrant watching Wise Guy, but director Gibney rarely directs surface-level documentaries about any of his subjects, let alone this beloved series. Groundbreaking individual episodes are analyzed for what they did that no one else dared to. And yes, Chase does dig deep into the controversial final scene of the last episode of the show without giving any definitive answers about its meaning or what happens after the scene smashes to black.
If you watched The Sopranos as simply a show about gangsters, Wise Guy proves that you were only getting about one-third of the point of it all. This film fills in a great deal of what else the series was trying to accomplish and why it’s still considered such iconic television.
The two-part documentary debuts Saturday, Sept. 7, on HBO, with Part 1 airing at 7pm CST, and Part 2 at 8:20pm CST; the film will be available to stream on Max as well.
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