James Gandolfini, killing them softly
Over eight years as Tony Soprano on The Sopranos James Gandolfini created a character so astonishingly empathetic, the travails of organized crime easily became a metaphor for the quotidian struggles of the middle ages of life, when one is variously whacked in the head by the demands of family, work, aging parents and the sense of the power and possibility of youth slowly slipping away. Chris Jones ponders the Meisne…