Nothing is quite so unsettling as an untimely death. It throws us off, makes us unsure of where we stand, suggests a disordered malignity in the universe. That helps explain the visceral emotional reaction over the past week to the death of James Gandolfini, which was marked by a funeral attended by thousands at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine yesterday.
His death at the age of 51 feels personal to those who loved his acting in a way it would not have if he had died at 81. It’s not right, not fair, that someone so young should just suddenly be gone.
We know the universe is not fair; we know injustice is more the way of the world than justice. But at certain times, we are forced to confront these unpleasant realities without being able to wish them away or turn our attention to other distractions.
Gandolfini might inspire such feeling more than most people we don’t know, especially here. After all, he and Tony Soprano were both such tri-state archetypes of a kind many of us New Yorkers have encountered over the years — Gandolfini the desperately insecure guy possessed of a performing genius he did not trust, Tony the dirty-handed working-class businessman who could be friendly one day and psychopathic the next.
But there was more to it than that. Gandolfini was raw, naked, exposed in a way few actors are. As Brett Martin details in his terrific new book about the new golden age of television, “Difficult Men,” Gandolfini lived his years as Tony in torment. The only way he knew to play this man simmering with violent rage was to duplicate those feelings inside himself and then essentially vomit them out (or hold them in) on film.
No struggling character actor nearing 40, which is what Gandolfini was when he was cast in 1998, had ever gotten such a break in all of show-business history. And yet playing the part was a torment to him. Why? Because Tony was, first and last, a monster, and Gandolfini had to be Tony, at least psychologically, to play him.
Even though we didn’t know this about him, the torment was clear from his work. That work was delivered over the course of 86 hours, making his Tony Soprano the greatest sustained performance ever given, in my view, and therefore possibly the greatest feat of acting ever recorded. And what we were seeing was not ordinary make-believe role-playing; it was another human being, erupting (or keeping himself from erupting) before our eyes.
We all had very complicated feelings about Tony Soprano — it’s what made the series so extraordinary, that those feelings were unresolvable. But I don’t know a single viewer who didn’t love James Gandolfini. That is not the usual way of things; usually the contradictory emotions provoked by a character would spill out onto our view of the actor playing him.
But in the case of “The Sopranos,” we could tell without knowing it that the part was eating Gandolfini alive, and it made us feel protective and close to him.
The brilliant and controversial conclusion to “The Sopranos” indicated that it somehow didn’t matter whether Tony lived or died at that moment. If he was not killed eating onion rings at Holsten’s that night, it would be another night at Holsten’s or somewhere else, and Tony knew it, and the knowledge was itself a kind of living death.
Not so for Gandolfini. Every time we saw him on screen afterward, you could sense a kind of relief and ease, as though not having to embody Tony’s evil was a liberation to him. And it was wonderful to see, as I suspect it will be wonderful to see him playing a romantic lead in “Enough Said” opposite Julia Louis-Dreyfus upon its release this fall.
When you grieve the untimely loss of someone you love, as my family is grieving the inconsolable loss of my sister Rachel three weeks ago, there’s a sense in which your grief is selfish.
She is gone too soon, everybody says. But we don’t think of her as suffering from the departure; we are suffering because we want her and need her and she isn’t there for us to talk to and laugh with and comfort and be comforted by us.
The loss of someone we don’t know, but whose work entertained and moved and changed us, has a whisper of that same quality. We mourn James Gandolfini’s passing in large measure because we will not have more of him — this consummate New Yorker and New Jerseyan, this consummate actor, who really did give everything he had.