5.
Gandolfini actually started his film career in New York, appearing in small parts in several films before he moved away from the theater and “went off to Hollywood with the boys.” If you’re in a generous mood, you could say his film career began in 1987 with walk-ons, like his role in the low-budget Shock! Shock! Shock!, in which he appeared as a hospital orderly. After playing the pimp in the 1989 student film Eddy, he took a part so small that it went uncredited in the 1991 Bruce Willis thriller The Last Boy Scout,and you had to look quick to catch him as a hood who tries to extort protection money from Hasidic jewelers in Sidney Lumet’s 1992 A Stranger Among Us, starring Melanie Griffith.
And then, in 1993, he landed the role of Virgil in True Romance.
Actually, he was in three movies that year. In Money for Nothing, which was shot in Philadelphia, he played the older brother of John Cusack, an out-of-work longshoreman who picks up $1.2 million that fell off an armored car in the middle of the street and then tries to take the money and run. In Italian Movie Gandolfini played a young version of Tony Soprano, a small-time neighborhood gambler and sexual predator. He was the chief villain of the film, and he lip-handles a cigar in a way Tony would later do every week in the opening credits for The Sopranos, but it was a flawed picture (even with Rita Moreno’s cameo). When Gandolfini became famous as Tony Soprano, the production company tried to repackage the film with a big photo of James, but his was really a supporting role.
True Romance was the standout, and not just because of the cast (Gary Oldman, Christian Slater, Brad Pitt, Dennis Hopper, Christopher Walken, Tom Sizemore, Chris Penn, and, of course, Patricia Arquette). For fans, True Romance is the first picture in which Gandolfini’s range as an actor was finally there to see. It even has a nifty subplot (not involving Gandolfini’s character, unfortunately), about trying to make it as a character actor in L.A.
For the people who knew Buck in life, however, it was almost a disappearing act.
“I swear to God, I saw him in that movie and I didn’t recognize him,” says Mark Di Ionno, the columnist for The Star-Ledger who drove Gandolfini to summer stock tryouts after freshman year at Rutgers. “I hadn’t seen him for ten years at that point, and man, he’d changed.”
We’ve already described the balletic beating Gandolfini gives Patricia Arquette in True Romance, and the ordeal of filming that twelve-minute scene over five days. It says something about Gandolfini’s courtliness, and maybe about his sense of gender stereotypes, that he begged Aston not to go see it (she still hasn’t). Gandolfini is brutal and terribly convincing in that scene. What gave the beating its dramatic punch, however, was the writing by Quentin Tarantino.
William Goldman, who wrote the screenplay for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, once described that entire movie as a series of reversals of audience expectations. Almost from the beginning, the film sends up the conventions of previous horse operas about the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang: The heroes are betrayed by their trusty sidekicks, the posse doesn’t give up when the going gets rough, Butch actually welcomes the bicycle as a potential replacement for his horse—scene after scene upending stereotypes and updating the western in the process.
Quentin Tarantino writes that way, too, only more so. The big reversal in Gandolfini’s scene is, of course, that Arquette shoots him with his pistol-grip shotgun at the end. But each little segment along the way twists expectations, too—Arquette doesn’t wail and beg for mercy, Gandolfini doesn’t just kill her when he finds the suitcase, the tiny corkscrew he mocks becomes an effective weapon, and so on. And until he feels that corkscrew bore into his foot, Gandolfini wears a tight but playful smile that became almost the actor’s trademark. He does wince-worthy things throughout the scene, like putting a pretty girl through a glass shower door, for example. And the biggest reversal of all is how we feel about him for it.
Virgil is not a leading character, and he isn’t on screen for very long, but he’s unforgettable because of that genial air of menace. It’s almost a meta performance in that way, a picture of an actor enjoying his twists on other actors playing heavies. When Virgil’s anger is loosed, it’s thrilling because we’ve been waiting for it, almost hoping for it, to clear the air of ambiguity. And the premonition of Tony Soprano is unmistakable.
“The boys” in that film are all, more or less, graduates of what we might call the Streetcar school of male sexuality (Gary Oldman is an exception, perhaps, but is Joe Orton really so different from Tennessee Williams?). Slater is the only real romantic lead. The rest are character actors who, here and there, had breakthrough roles that made them leads—usually roles that allowed them to show an unexpected tenderness or courage or vulnerability.
The Hollywood tradition of turning tough guys into leads is venerable, beginning, you could say, with Humphrey Bogart and Jimmy Cagney, and continuing through Lee Marvin, Warren Oates, Charles Bronson, and on and on. Maybe we should think of it as an inevitable kind of type reversal that comes after committing X number of murders on the screen. True Romance put Bucky’s foot firmly on that ladder (even though, without getting all Anthony Weiner about it, he didn’t actually murder anyone in True Romance). There was no guaranteed career, exactly, but you could not mistake the ladder presented. Combined with that physical fearlessness he displayed again and again as a young man, and the affability that won him friends wherever he went, Gandolfini might have seemed a good bet to become a star even when he had so few credits to his name.
Anyway, after True Romance, acting really seemed like a grown-up career choice for a thirty-two-year-old single guy. Gandolfini wasn’t ready to quit any part-time day job quite yet, but he at least felt sure enough to actually rent a place to live on the West Coast, too. He had started signing leases for his own apartments in Brooklyn and Manhattan in 1989. In 1994, he rented a place in Malibu (he would rent apartments in Sherman Oaks the next year, and a house from 1996 to 1998 in Mount Olympus, in the Hollywood Hills, but he never changed his official residency from New York City throughout his career). For five years he bounced from one coast to the other and from Tennessee to Boston to Florida to the south of France, depending on the production.
Wherever the movies were set, Gandolfini alternated between playing thoughtful, reluctant, bipolar, or just plain likable brutes, and portraying average working-class guys for whom violence was contemptible, or at least, unthinkable.
Sometimes he played characters that weren’t killers, exactly, but brought a similar kind of animal ferocity to the screen. In Le Nouveau Monde, released in the states as The New World in 1995 but shot much earlier, he played an army sergeant with American occupying forces in 1950s France who likes to pick fights with blacks but loves jazz. He helps a sixteen-year-old kid from Orléans learn to play drums “like Gene Krupka” even as he seduces the boy’s local girlfriend and goes into an alcoholic tailspin. It’s a major if little-known performance, one of his first near-leads, in a French-based production directed by Alain Corneau and costarring Alicia Silverstone. Gandolfini completely dominates the film, showing off his peculiar mix of menace and likability—and standing in for American culture in a way he wouldn’t again until Tony Soprano.
One year after True Romance comes Terminal Velocity, starring Charlie Sheen. Gandolfini played Ben Pinkwater, a seemingly mild-mannered district attorney who turns out to be a violent Russian mobster, a brute in disguise.
That same year, in 1994, Gandolfini took the part of Vinnie, the rejected suitor to Geena Davis, in Angie, a twisted romantic comedy. Based on the novel Angie, I Says, by Avra Wing, which was listed as a notable book by The New York Times in 1991, Angiedoes serious damage to the conventional Hollywood happy ending. Vinnie is a plumber—there’s a Home Improvement–style send-up of early housing-bubble hardware commercials that gives Gandolfini one of his first comic bits in a movie—and a loyal Bensonhurst boyfriend who can’t understand why she won’t marry him. Especially since Angie is pregnant with his child. Instead, she has a fling with an international lawyer she meets in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who of course rabbits when she goes into labor.
It’s a story about love and class and being a single mother, and about deciding to stay single even though there’s a perfectly suitable husband-in-waiting right in front of you.
Susan Aston says she never saw Angie, either—Jim told her Vinnie didn’t need any backstory preparation because he’d already done it, with her, in Tarantulas Dancing. Shot in New York City, Angie had the same sort of dynamic as Bucky and M’Darlin’, in the sense that the male character is shocked to find the girl rejects him, and then struggles to accept it. “I was always so happy for him for his success,” Aston says, “but that was hard. Not now—now I love teaching acting [she is on the full-time faculty at The Actors Studio Masters of Fine Arts program, which is part of Pace University in lower Manhattan], but then, for a while, it was.”
Vinnie was a major part, the biggest Gandolfini had landed to date in an impressive production with Hollywood stars, with real sympathy for a working-class guy. It was the kind of role he’d always wanted, and in a big-budget movie that is actually pretty successful as a drama.
But the movie didn’t do as well as expected. Young women, including single mothers, didn’t like Geena Davis leaving her sick baby to search for her own mother at the end of the movie. And they just couldn’t understand why, when she comes back and devotes herself to raising her child, she doesn’t just accept Vinnie, too. Like, what was wrong with big, sweet, lovable, rock-solid James Gandolfini?
Maybe, the audience decided, there was something wrong with Davis.
Angie was a preview of what Gandolfini could bring to a movie, and the effect he could have on an audience well beyond the confines of the script. Even though it was something of a disappointment financially, Angie went a long way toward making James a star. Not quite a romantic lead, but certainly a serious character actor.
His way of celebrating was to rent a really big beach house at Mantoloking, on the Jersey Shore, for the summer of 1994, and invite everybody he knew for a month-long party.
T.J. Foderaro came down. He was about to begin working as a wine critic. It was the last time they really hung out. T.J. remembers getting phone calls from Jim on the West Coast afterward, often at two thirty or three o’clock in the morning, around midnight in L.A. T.J. would tell Jim he had to work the next day. Could they talk in the morning some time? The phone would just click off.
* * *
If the nights grew long on the far coast, it had to be heady, anyway. Just a couple of years after Angie he’s doing scenes with Hollywood royalty like Travolta, Sean Penn, Brad Pitt, Rosanna and Patricia Arquette, even the actor Roger Bart had recommended as a role model, Gene Hackman. Gandolfini didn’t take it for granted, though—he was too “grounded,” as theater people say, to make that mistake. He’s making character actor money, remember, never more than low-to-mid-five figures for any role. When Sidney Lumet called to offer him a part in Night Falls on Manhattan in 1996, Jim took the call on his cell phone while planting trees for the city in the sidewalk.
By 1995, Gandolfini seemed on the verge of breaking through. He had major parts in two widely anticipated Hollywood all-star productions: Get Shorty, based on the Elmore Leonard novel, and then Crimson Tide, a submarine-borne national security thriller starring Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington. He hired a new assistant, a pretty blonde who happened to be between jobs, named Marcy Wudarski. She’d never heard of Gandolfini. Marcy had been working for movie companies for a while, and like Aston, she was a military brat from the South (Florida, if that counts). It wasn’t long before the two were dating.
In Get Shorty, Gandolfini appears as Bear, a gentle leg-breaker working for drug dealers who wants to be a good father. He gets beaten up twice by New Jersey neighbor John Travolta in the film, and yet comes around to join Travolta’s Chili Palmer at the end—quite the character reversal in itself. Bear’s change of allegiance is the emotional hinge of the movie, turning on his desire to protect his family, and confirming Chili’s defeat of the main villain, played by Delroy Lindo.
Get Shorty was a hit, and Bear (for whom Gandolfini attempted his first southern accent in a film) is one of the most memorable characters in the movie. Even more than True Romance, Get Shorty is a meta take on Hollywood success, a send-up of industry hype, the feckless dreamers that feed showbiz sharks, and the grubby details of financing that make it all possible. And it’s full of questions about traditional movie stereotypes—like the character of Bear himself.
Crimson Tide should have expanded the triumph of Get Shorty. Gandolfini played Lieutenant Bobby Dougherty, a crewman caught in the conflict between his two superior officers. The part carried much of the emotional stress of the plot, not unlike the way Bear in Get Shorty prefigured the audience’s approval of Chili Palmer. Director Tony Scott wanted Jim to do it right after he was finished working in France on Le Nouveau Monde, which gave him very little time to prepare. He’d only read the script through once, weeks before. According to Lennie Loftin, a character actor who befriended Jim in the early 1990s, Jim was worried about getting in front of the camera so soon after flying back to the United States. But he didn’t want to disappoint the director of True Romance.
Scott made four movies with Gandolfini, and the roles he did for the British director (who committed suicide about a year before Gandolfini’s own death) were intrinsic to the kind of star James would become. Unfortunately, Virgil in True Romance was not exactly the kind of thing you wanted your mother to see, especially if your mother was like Jim’s mother.
“Keeping Mama happy” was more than just Gandolfini’s off-hand explanation for why he went to Rutgers. It was a real concern of his, all his life, and a particular sore spot was his choice of career. The slightly formal dignity that his colleagues remarked upon in the jokey and irreverent James probably was handed down from Santa; at the same time, the “Class Flirt” in Gandolfini wanted to be loved for his own insouciance. There was a constant tension.
Once, when a local Florida reporter asked Gandolfini to describe Santa Gandolfini, he simply sat bolt upright in his chair and closed his fist in front of his chest, miming a person of great propriety and dignity. Her family ran a small bar in Milan, and even though she’d been born in New Jersey, she had gone back as a child before the war.
“She went through the war in Italy—I think she was about eighteen when the war happened,” Jim said later. “She was going to be a doctor. And everything got all screwed up and she had to come to America. I mean, think about this—this was the forties, and she was going to be a doctor.”
At just about the same time Gandolfini got back from France, Loftin had decided to move out to Los Angeles to try his hand at acting. (Loftin has appeared in several major films, including The Sleeper and 3:10 to Yuma.) “He knew I was moving out and called to ask when,” Loftin said in an e-mail relayed to me by one of Jim’s oldest friends. “I said I was coming out with my bull terrier, Millie, in mid-October. I was planning on sleeping on a couple of couches ’til I found a place, but he told me he’d just arrived for Crimson Tide and that he had an extra bedroom in a furnished beach condo on the L.A.–Ventura County line, across from Neptune’s Net, and I could stay with him while he did the film.”
Neptune’s Net is a seafood place popular with bikers and surfers just across the county line in Ventura. It’s been a neighborhood landmark for more than a generation. That stretch of the coast highway going north is sort of like the Jersey Shore, but bigger—the straight, flat beach stretching out almost as far as the eye can see in either direction, and in front of you the bright boundless Pacific Ocean, where every night the sun sets in an orgy of golds and purples. It’s a very nice place to live, especially in a beachfront condo provided by your production company.
“While we were living there, Jim’s parents came out to visit for about a week,” Loftin recalled. Jim’s two older sisters were already well on their ways to responsible jobs, Johanna with the court system in Jersey and Leta as a corporate executive in the garment trade. “One day we were waiting for dinner to cook—I think a game was on TV—so his mom went out to sit in a chair on the deck in the afternoon sun for a few minutes. She looked so happy and peaceful—and almost relieved—like she was able to absorb it all, and she knew that her boy was doing the right thing with his life and that he was going to be okay. I pointed her out to Jim. He got it.”
Crimson Tide opened to positive reviews, and it made money, but the story of conflict between submariners of different generations seemed a bit tired. Still, it was a major role with major stars. Gandolfini bought his first home ever in 1996, a nice apartment in the West Village, but his acting career seemed to slow. He released just one film that year, The Juror—it was shot in New York City—starring fellow Streetcar veteran Alec Baldwin and Demi Moore.
It’s in The Juror that we begin to see what you might call the Gandolfini Effect: his performance is so good that it comes close to capsizing the movie. Eddie is a hitman, working with rogue Mafia enforcer Alec Baldwin, but he clearly wants to do it with a minimum of angst. Scare the civilian, sure, but keep it within reason—the victim’s cooperation in getting the boss off the hook at his trial is Eddie’s real focus.
Baldwin’s character seems to enjoy terrorizing Moore for its own sake, and somehow to be lost about whom he really is. But Eddie is a normalizing force. His meeting with Moore in a Brooklyn grocery store, where he confesses he’s got a kid himself—as if that absolves him of the horror the mob is putting her through—is fascinating. It’s just my job, ma’am, nothing personal; please keep your hands and arms inside the vehicle at all times during the ride and you’ll be fine.
It’s not true, of course. Nothing the victim does will make her fine. But you get the sense that Eddie really wants it to be true.
And critics seemed to notice. Roger Ebert said The Juror would have been a much better movie if the entire script had been pitched at the level of Gandolfini’s performance.
Then, in early January 1997, Santa Gandolfini died.
Several years later, The National Enquirer managed to browbeat Gandolfini into discussing on the record his struggles with cocaine and alcohol in the late nineties. On September 26, 1997, about eight months after his mother died, he was arrested for DUI in Los Angeles. “I was racing someone and I was over the limit,” he said, joking that “it was the best French toast I ever had when they woke me up in the Beverly Hills jail.”
It was an era when Hollywood stars, particularly male stars, seemed to generate stories about drug abuse and wild behavior as if they were on contract to do so. The problems of Robert Downey, Jr., and True Romance costar Tom Sizemore were recurrent tabloid fodder. People who worked with Gandolfini later in his career, when he seemed to have control of his drinking and drug abuse, often casually assumed his problems were similar.
But there’s actually very little on the record to confirm that assumption. Gandolfini’s bad behavior seemed much more episodic than that, like the mood swings friends noticed in college. And he often seemed deeply repentant when it was over, and moved to surprising generosity to anyone he might have offended or inconvenienced. It’s not even certain by any means that these occasional breakouts into substance abuse were the cause of Jim’s friends’ extraordinary protectiveness.
However much of a problem it was, it didn’t interfere with getting back to work. He was a corrupt cop in Sidney Lumet’s Night Falls in Manhattan (1997), a beguiling rapist in She’s So Lovely (same year, made from an old script by John Cassavetes and directed by his son, Nick, with Sean Penn and John Travolta), and good cop possessed by the demon Azazel in Fallen (1998). All of them were both magnetically dangerous and oddly sympathetic.
He was still alternating these roles with attempts at expanding his character actor credits, too. In 1997, in the “Columbus Day” pilot episode of Robert Altman’s six-part TV series Gun, Gandolfini was another solid, ethnic working guy (who boasts that “Everything that looks good or tastes good was invented by Italians”). His wife, played by Rosanna Arquette, is secretly cheating on him, and the plot is cleverly fashioned so that Jim shoots her lover without ever finding out about the affair—he’s a nice guy anda killer, and a bit of an innocent dupe. Later that year he played a Drug Enforcement Administration agent who keeps getting hit by passing vehicles but is never hurt, kind of like Wile E. Coyote, in Perdita Durango. Durango was a Spanish production directed by Álex de la lglesia, a sort of horror-crime movie starring Rosie Perez and Javier Bardem. It was one of Jim’s first completely comic roles, though it was embedded in a kind of bloody occult-revenge flick.
The film he seemed to care about the most from this period was A Civil Action (1998), starring John Travolta and Robert Duvall. Shot in Boston, the movie was based on a real incident of chemical contamination in Woburn, Massachusetts, that established corporate responsibility for poisoning public water supplies. Gandolfini’s part was modest but crucial—he plays Al, the first employee of the waste disposal companies working for W. R. Grace and Beatrice Foods to come forward with evidence of improper dumping of carcinogens in the town’s watershed. Literally a working-class hero.
Gandolfini may have been thinking about this film when, years later, on Inside the Actors Studio, he answered a question about what alternative profession he might have liked to pursue if he hadn’t become an actor: “Environmental lawyer.”
Still, it was the heavies the movies wanted him to do, the desperate monsters you hoped could be saved but really were already lost. In the melodrama about disabled children The Mighty (1998) he played “Killer” Kane, the abusive father of one of the protagonists, and in 8MM (1999) he was a talent scout for snuff films who is murdered by Nicholas Cage (both characters are thoroughly reprehensible).
Oscar Wilde, who knew something about acting and the theater, once said that neither the state of sin nor that of innocence interested him so much as the moment he passed from one to the other. Gandolfini’s gift as an actor is to show us how to dance along the line between good and evil, only to suddenly drive across in a blur of immediacy. Just as he did in Gately’s class when he “destroyed all that crap they have on stage.” Until that moment, he makes us root for him to control himself, not just because it’s scary to see such a big guy lose it, but because he makes you feel how much he really wants to keep it together himself.
It pulls your sympathy, but it also makes the viewer complicit with his character, giving even his mundane bad guys an odd resonance.
And it was the résumé that he brought with him to what would become his greatest creation as an actor.