Dear James Gandolfini

It’s been almost four months since beloved Sopranos star James Gandolfini left us. And I still struggle processing or admitting that he’s gone.

We never really know why a certain actor — or the character he plays — connects with us on such a visceral level. Once in a while someone just does and we accept it, watching him portray someone we think we already know only for us to realize that we don’t have any idea what the person playing that role feels or struggles with on a daily basis.

Truth is, none of us really knew Gandolfini the man. We knew Tony Soprano. And we loved him. But there was so much more to the actor who portrayed him.

My admiration of Mr. Gandolfini began when I first saw him on the big screen, playing a violent yet charming mobster in True Romance, Quentin Tarantino’s first screenplay, brought to life in 1993 with a cast that also included Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette, Gary Oldman, Bronson Pinchot, Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Rapaport, Saul Rubinek, Chris Penn, Tom Sizemore and Val Kilmer (as Elvis’s ghost). The legendary and controversial scene between Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper still leaves film lovers in speechless glee.

Yet one of the most tender and funny moments in True Romance reveals itself to us when Gandolfini’s Virgil intrudes on a bong-smoking Floyd, perfectly played by then a totally unknown Brad Pitt.  It was the first of three collaborations between the two men, following up with The Mexican (2001) and Killing Them Softly (2012). In True Romance, with the minute or so of shared screen-time, the two convey an absurdness that is both hilarious and frightening.

That was the magic of Gandolfini. He could flip from charming to lethal in one gesture, one word, one look, one heavy nasal sigh.

When The Sopranos went off the air in that post-modernistic “What the hell?” 2007 ending, there were months, even years, when I still had vivid dreams with Tony and Carmella showing up, speaking and interacting with me. The drama may have been over, but in the subconscious it lived on. Tony and Carmella added themselves to the shelf of memories, alongside friends and even family members that actually existed in my life.

How did this happen? I don’t have the answer and I won’t bother trying to figure it out.

These days, you can’t turn anywhere without seeing Gandolfini’s mischievous and warm face.  Edie Falco gave him a powerful tribute at the Emmy Awards. He’s featured on the cover of the new book, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad.  Zero Dark Thirty is on cable, in high-rotation. His new romantic comedy with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Enough Said, is receiving rave reviews, a rarity given that the RomCom genre is all but now dead. And HBO continues to play all of The Sopranos seasons, in sequential order, each night, at 8 and 11PM, ensuring my evenings are spent with the most memorable family in television history.

I’ve been wanting to see Enough Said since I first heard of it. It was recently released in the movie theaters, ready to be screened and enjoyed by film lovers exhausted from the summer blockbusters. Yet something inside of me hesitates. It’s one of the last films he made before his untimely death. I didn’t want him to die.

Losing Roger Ebert and James Gandolfini within the same year, and what felt like the same season, is a double-mourning I didn’t foresee when 2013 began. True, this has been a transitional year of letting a lot of things and people go, but not the good people. And to me Ebert and Gandolfini were good people. Why? Because they elevated our consciousness by elevating their crafts. This is what we’re all accountable to do. This is what we strive for.

On June 20, just one day after his passing, I posted a tweet about our favorite robe-wearing, newspaper-getting and ziti-eating character, including a link to the corresponding YouTube video. The episode, focusing on Columbus Day, wraps up with a monologue on how sensitive everyone is these days about our culture, our heritage and our labels. It was, yet again, a simultaneously poignant and ridiculously funny scene of a man who can’t understand the changes happening in the world around him and is craving the nostalgia of a more meaningful past. We all know the past isn’t as perfect as we think it was, but we can’t help but sympathize with Tony. We get it.

The day I posted the Tweet, two high school friends from Chicago reached out to me via Facebook to share that my message scrolled across a national newscast. This made me smile. It comforted me. It made me hope that somewhere, somehow, Mr. Gandolfini is now watching us.

[Images via Google, Twitter, YouTube]

Reprinted with permission and gratitude from CoolCleveland.com.