‘Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos’ Review: Alex Gibney’s Sensationally Artful Documentary Explores Every Angle of TV’s Greatest Show
variety.comOwen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Overflowing with insight; stuffed with bracing interviews and anecdotes and archival footage; as bursting with flavor as a baked ziti; and as immersive, in its way, as the show itself, “Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos” is Alex Gibney’s sensationally artful and engrossing two-hour-and-40-minute documentary about the greatest show in the history of television.
If you’re a fanatic for “The Sopranos” (and who isn’t?), you probably already know a fair amount about how the show came to be, and “Wise Guy,” for a while, treads familiar ground.
The film is framed as a profile of the show’s visionary creator and showrunner, David Chase (the opening credits redo the driving-into-Jersey “Sopranos” credits with Chase in the passenger seat), who is interviewed by Gibney on an exact mock-up of the set of Dr.
Melfi’s psychiatrist office, a joke/stunt that recedes into the background yet never loses its playful resonance, since it pings off the way that “The Sopranos,” for Chase, was a kind of therapy.
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