“The Penguin”: Sofia Falcone’s emancipating, completely reasonable rage

To measure Sofia Falcone‘s situational anger at every moment in “The Penguin” is not difficult. Just look at her eyes – not just at the emotions that flicker in them, but also at how she paints them. When Sofia (Cristin Milioti) is first introduced, her makeup is barely visible and understated, as you would expect from a true Gotham heiress.

We assume her ornate, subtle clothing comes from the closet she had to leave behind before her decade-long stay in Arkham Asylum, and from an era when she was still Dad’s favorite. Ivanka Trump to Donald by Carmine Falcone. Pre-Arkham Sofia sparkles happily, knowing her father plans for her to take over the family business.

Then she makes the fatal mistake of discovering that Carmine has murdered a series of women, including her mother Isabella badda-bing-badda-boom — Dad pins his murders on his little girl, has the local media label her as The Hangman and locks her up with Gotham City’s worst.

Ten years later, after Carmine (Mark Strong) and her brother Alberto (Michael Blessing) are dead, Sofia returns home to find her uncles seizing her birthright. That’s when her ominous war painting emerges, a sharp black edge from tear duct to wing crowning an icy, distrustful gaze.

Those who know fashion will recognize this as the cat’s eye. Those who know the history may see shades of it Hatshepsutthe female pharaoh, in that look. Anyway, at the climax of the pivotal episode titled “Cent’anni,” it’s announced that she has no intention of quietly accepting her reputation stains.

At a dinner celebrating her uncle Luca’s unseemly ascension, she steps into the room, sits across the table, and interrupts his self-aggrandizing speech to address the relatives who contributed to her father’s slander.

“I was honestly surprised to see how many of you wrote letters to the judge telling him I was mentally ill. Just like my mother,” she said. “. . . I trusted you. I loved you. And yet none of you tried to help me.” She admits that she understands that she no longer fits in with the family, announces that she will start a new life the next day and gives a non-specific toast to new beginnings.

Cristin Milioti in “The Penguin” (Macall Polay/HBO)Hours later, Sofia wipes out all but two of the people at that table. Not long after, she announces to the remaining muscle group that she and the family have a new name: Gigante. Her mother’s.

Sofia Falcone was introduced in 1997 in Tim Sale’s “Batman: The Long Halloween,” the text that explains the fall of the Falcone criminal dynasty, the same ground that “The Penguin” covers. Her trajectory in those comic books influences her history in “The Penguin,” with one of the major deviations being her appearance.

Sale found her unattractive and erratic. The 2021 animated film adaptation makes her more glamorous, but she’s still a zaftig giantess she’s too heavy for Cat lady to hold while dangling from the side of a building.

“Gotham” introduced a sexier version of the character who had a brief affair with James Gordon. Ergo, against this history, Milioti’s physical characteristics are completely relevant to how we perceive Sofia. The actor’s physique could easily be mistaken for the kind that could break a ruthless heavyweight like a twig or silence by barking a reminder to know her place. The knives in her gaze showed them the danger in that conceited fallacy.

Milioti’s eyes often come into play in critical assessments of her work, which is not helpful in assessing someone with such a prominent and expressive trait.

But it’s the way she uses her gaze in that Last Supper monologue and every moment of “The Penguin” that captures the extraordinary nature of a little-known character in the “Batman” universe.

Sofia doesn’t cry. Her eyes turn red and her voice cracks with the anger she has earned, but she knows that even to an audience of convicts, people who easily dismiss her as unhinged and unstable, she cannot seem anything less than solid in her resolve.

In a tense scene from the second episode, the family’s henchmen refuse to hand her a gun when she demands it to execute one of the men she believes has betrayed her. No matter what Sofia does or doesn’t do, her patriarchal criminal family refuses to give her the respect she deserves – even when she has one, her uncle Johnny Viti (Michael Kelly), chained up for torture.

Not long before, Johnny threatens to abandon his niece if she does not disappear to Italy. After Sofia commits a mass murder of Frey, leaving him alone and chained in his underwear, bargaining for his life, he tries to shame her by saying, “What kind of person kills his own family?”

You get the logic: Sofia, you see, has no right to kill it – But He can kill her. She is not an equal in blood or status until it matters to the man trying to save his skin.

“Daddy’s dead,” she tells Oz Cobb over dirty martinis in the first episode, “and we’re untamed.”

“The Penguin” is a window into a dark universe that, like all “Batman” titles, bears a close resemblance to the nightmare version of our own universe. Gotham comes to life as a right-wing talking point, hollowed out by federal disinvestment and left to the whims of street gangs, gangsters and the benevolent grace of a billionaire industrialist named Bruce Wayne.

The endless malleability of this part of the DC Comic universe is tied to the knowledge that its hero and most of its core rogues gallery, even at their most fantastic, are subject to the laws of physics, including socio-economic gravity .

With ‘The Penguin’, an outgrowth of Matt Reeves‘ 2022 vision for ‘The Batman,’ series creator Lauren LeFranc revises what we know about the villain.

Cristin Milioti and Mark Strong in “The Penguin” (Macall Polay/HBO)Gone is Burgess Meredith’s pointed tribute to Mr. Monopoly, with his top hat, tuxedo and monocle, is replaced by Oz Cobb (Colin Farrell, completely disappeared under a mountain of naturalistic prosthetics), a sweaty street striver reminiscent of Tony Sopranowith a similarly unhealthy relationship with his mother, Deirdre O’Connell’s Francis Cobb.

In Bob Kane’s comics, The Penguin, aka Oswald Cobblepot, was portrayed as Bruce Wayne in a negative form: rich, but selfish and eager to take advantage of the people’s pain instead of standing up for them. Where Wayne’s Batman is lithe and graceful, The Penguin is clumsy and round; while Wayne is charismatic, the Penguin is a madman, a quack.

With Sofia, however, LeFranc shows that he understands an underlying frustration with the way these stories portray female characters and with a misogynistic culture’s declining attention to female power.

Any delight or inspiration that Milioti’s gangland empress makes us feel is a natural response to our fatigue at this point in a campaign cycle leading to an election that will act as a referendum on gender. In less than two weeks, we will find out whether Americans are more committed to their internalized sexism than to their democratic principles.

We can sense where this is all going, and so can the writers of “The Penguin,” because it’s an old, old story: One of the cleverest nods in direction is in a scene where Oz and his son Vic ( Rhenzy Feliz) watching. “Gilda” at his mother’s house and reflect on Rita Hayworth’s steamy rendition of “Put the Blame on Mame.”

“Who’s Mom?” Vic asks. “It doesn’t matter, boy,” Oz tells him. ‘That’s the point. She’s just a scapegoat.”

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We love a villain like Sofia in theory because her excessive impulses are the realization of every frustrated, angry, and perfectly sane woman’s darkest thoughts. She’s not overly emotional or crazy; Ironically, Arkham Asylum bled these perceived weaknesses out of her. Sofia is more capable than any of her family’s capos, something they will never accept because she has no penis. Unlike her irresponsible and erratic brother, she is calculating and stoic and knows that no matter how she dresses, talks or what she does, she will never get rid of her Hangman fame.

When Sofia takes her new name, she stands at the head of the table, announces that she has wiped out her family, shoots the last man made in the head when he tries to order her to settle down, and throws a bag of money on table. for the pawns of the mafia. By the way, her eyeliner has been moved to her lower eyelid to outline the darkness of her soul. That’s called the reverse cat’s eye. . . That could be a coincidence, who knows?

Every great “Batman” villain (or anti-heroine, in the case of Catwoman) exists in relation to men or a specific man. Catwoman and Poison Ivy are highly regarded for being seductresses. Harley Quinnfor her great emancipationwas the ultimate gangster moll that existed at and for the pleasure of The Joker.

However, Sofia is not a little girl or Carmela Soprano. She is a force propelled by her own will: Arya Stark with Joan Jett’s haircut, a girl who takes her mother’s name and dresses in her armor. ‘The Penguin’ may be nominally concerned with the fall of Gotham’s organized crime underworld and the rise of Oz Cobb from zero to immortal adversary, but it will be a long time before the legend of Sofia Gigante enters our memory disappears.

New episodes of “The Penguin” stream every Sunday at 9 p.m. on HBO Max.