Published May 8, 2015

Note: I wrote this more than two years before coming out as trans. Still inside my egg, I couldn’t say everything I wanted or needed to say, but this was as real as I’d allow myself to be publicly in those days. Looking back, I more easily see that I viewed him as a safe person and place for me to sometimes hide inside.

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“Enough Said” has been making the rounds on cable, and seeing it again reminded me of thoughts I scribbled down after watching it in the cinema in fall 2013. I recall wondering whether the movie would be a boost to the dating chances of big guys like Albert, played by the late James Gandolfini.

In fairness to writer/director Nicole Holofcener and everyone else who created “Enough Said,” let me assure you it is indeed a film and not a dating app. I don’t mean to relegate its art to something that might help someone find a dinner companion. The film has wit, and a soul, and it charms, to use a word I saw in more than one headline — including this one in reference to the male lead. For those who knew Gandolfini only as Tony Soprano on “The Sopranos,” the movie shows other aspects of his acting range. It does the same for those who know Julia Louis-Dreyfus only as Elaine from “Seinfeld.”

In an Associated Press story widely distributed around the time of the film’s release, Louis-Dreyfus was quoted about that side of Gandolfini.

The release of the film has been bittersweet for all of those involved, coming just three months after the death of Gandolfini. Louis-Dreyfus was a big admirer of the actor before working with him: “I thought he was sort of dreamy,” she says.

“James was very much like the character, Albert, that he plays in this movie: very dear, thoughtful, self-effacing kind of guy,” she says, choking up. “It’s lovely for his legacy and even for his family to have this performance documented because it shows him as this loving, dear man, which he was.”

Being roughly the same size and shape (and age) as Gandolfini when he made the movie, I was again reminded that I’ve found myself identifying with him in some ways since rediscovering him more than a decade ago (I’d seen him and liked him in other films, but his Tony Soprano is what hooked me). In the winter months, wearing a jacket not unlike one he would wear on “The Sopranos,” I sometimes recognized I also put on his lumbering walk, and when I noticed my shadow I couldn’t help imagining at times I was adopting his posture, maybe wearing the strong, assertive side of him as a shield. (Who would have thought that years earlier when I bought that jacket I was inadvertently paying, in the parlance of the mob world, protection money?)

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