Love hurts, love scars, love wounds and mars
Any heart not tough or strong enough
To take a lot of pain, take a lot of pain
And later, after Tony accidentally injures her shoulder, and the vanishing of Adriana gnaws further into Carmela's consciousness, the song reverberates as an elegy or, perhaps, a valediction.
That large-writ-small atmosphere is the key to the return of "The Sopranos," as TV's most deservedly beloved drama begins the final nine. Called "Soprano Home Movies," Sunday's sublime episode represents another of Chase's bold moves -- a last return without a big bang. This is an hour that slips slowly into darkness on the kind of domestic melodrama that irks Action Sopranos fans uninterested in psychological abundance. It is a mournful, foreboding episode, and it's expertly fraught with the subtextual family tensions of modern stage drama.
Indeed, the setup for the episode has a loose parallel in Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," as Tony and Carmela join Janice and Bobby for a few nights at their lakeside home in upstate New York. It doesn't take long for nerves to fray between the couples; just the presence of Janice can transform a peaceful setting into a minefield. "Look at you and me, Tony," she says, every inch her passive-aggressive mother's daughter. "Who would have thought we'd have the kind of relationship we have now? The credit goes to you. You really changed." With people like Janice, a pat on the back is more like a slap.
As Janice, Aida Turturro is as scary-good as ever, projecting the insidious danger of a person who's both unconscious of her anger and a bottomless pit of need. Like the late Nancy Marchand, who played Livia, Turturro is all raw reflex and delusion. In one scene Sunday night, Turturro exposes how Janice reconstructs and twists her world as she recalls an old boyfriend to Carmela. "In the end, he went his separate way," she says with melancholy. That boyfriend was Richie Aprile, and most of us know "his separate way" as six feet under. Janice is a hard character to watch -- that's how effective Turturro is.
