James Gandolfini on Film: Emotional Textures in a Deceptive Face

Merrick Morton/Dreamworks Pictures James Gandolfini with Julia Roberts in “The Mexican.”

At one point in David Chase’s coming-of-age movie “Not Fade Away,” the young protagonist - a Jersey boy who dreams of breaking free of 1960s suburbia and the towering, disproving father played by James Gandolfini - looks at a film with Orson Welles. It isn’t just any film, but “Touch of Evil,” the 1958 pitch-black noir in which Welles cast himself as a great ruin of a man, a corrupt cop named Hank Quinlan. Mr. Chase holds on the movie and Welles just long enough for you to see this big man looming in the frame, this colosus of the art, long enough to set off a relay that links Welles’s image to that of the boy’s father and that of another titan played by Mr. Gandolfini, Tony Soprano.

In that single delirious cinematic moment, Mr. Chase creates a chain of signification that illuminates the oedipal undertow that helped make “The Sopranos” a pop cultural sensation. Playing television’s scariest father (daddy kills best) could turned into a trap for Mr. Gandolfini, but his talent transcended the medium. Television was neither his stage nor a cage, but rather a pathway to other roles, including parts in film and in theater. He had appeared in some 20 movies before he was in “The Sopranos,” though beyond “True Romance,” you might be hard pressed to name most of them. Looks can be destiny for movie actors, particularly when no one knows what they’ve got, and it’s no surprise that initially he p! layed bruisers and bullies and guys named Angelo, Vinnie, Eddie and Joey.

People did notice, though, smart, influential movie people like Sidney Lumet, who put Mr. Gandolfini in several films. Roger Ebert was another early admirer. In his pan of a risible 1996 diversion, “The Juror,” Mr. Ebert, after breezing past its stars, Demi Moore and Alec Baldwin, admiringly singled out Mr. Gandolfini and his line readings. “If the movie had been pitched at the level of sophistication and complexity that his character represents,” Mr. Ebert wrote, “it would have been a lot better.” Such is the fate of the great character actors, who, role after role, are called on to add shading - a line reading, a swaggering gait, a jaw that leads, quivers, retreats - to lesser pictures. From the late 1980s to the late 1990s that’s precisely what Mr. Gandolfini did until Mr. Chase arrived with his game changer.

Mr. Gandolfini’s movie career, which had started to gather momentum before “The Sopranos,” an be divided into two epochs simply because every time he appeared on the big or small screen after the show he brought Tony Soprano with him. Breaking free of a famous role can be hard for an actor, particularly for one who was as closely associated with a show as he was. This isn’t necessarily a question of range, but of the rhythms and intimacy of episodic television, which, week after week in our homes connects performer and their roles until they can feel interchangeable. For some actors, like Sarah Michelle Gellar in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” a role can become the apotheosis of a career, the moment when a perfect actor and a perfect role became a transcendent whole.

However brilliant Mr. Gandolfini’s work in “The Sopranos” the two dozen or so movies he made after “The Sopranos” began proved there was more to him than its most ardent fans might have realized. There weren’t many films that were especially memorable, but even the more negligible, like “The Mexican” (! 2001), ha! ve their attractions. As he often did, he played a heavy in this one, a hit man called Leroy who, after kidnapping a woman (Julia Roberts), improbably makes you more curious about their relationship than the one she has with the boyfriend played by Brad Pitt. Whether Leroy is talking to her about the people he’s killed (those, who “have experienced love, they’re a little less scared”) or excavating his feelings, Mr. Gandolfini shifts the movie into a deeper, more sharply felt register.

Part of what pulls you into the performance is the play between that great beautiful slab of a face and the micro and macro movements that continuously ripple across it, creating changing, sometimes clashing emotional textures. One minute, the face opens out to the world like a child’s, the next it’s closing like a man’s fist. No matter what Mr. Gandolfini’s weight, which increased over time, his face remained a succession of rounded forms - the high forehead, the nos with the slightly bulbous tip - that when at rest could appear deceptively friendly, receptive. The divide between that face and what the character was thinking behind it was part of what made him such a great villain and, time and again, his characters led with a smile, an invitation that often became a trap for his victims.

There was more to him than his bad guys, though, as he showed in pinpoint turns in later movies as distinct as “In the Loop,” “The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3” and “Zero Darky Thirty.” He doesn’t actually appear on camera for one of his greatest performances as Carol, one of the title creatures in Spike Jonze’s “Where the Wild Things Are,” based on the Maurice Sendak book. Muting and blowing his signature nasal voice, Mr. Gandolfini magically transforms Carol - who onscreen is a lumbering beast with horns, a tail and a melancholic smile - into an achingly soulful being who’s by turns child and parent, the wild thing who makes you laugh, the one who makes ! you cry, ! the one who will hold you tight in his arms and who, as you sail away, will howl his love from the shore.