ANALYZE THIS (Warner Bros. - 1999) Cast: Robert De Niro, Billy Crystal, Lisa Kudrow, Joe Viterelli, Chazz Palminteri Screenplay by Peter Tolan and Harold Ramis and Kenneth Lonergan Produced by Paula Weinstein and Jane Rosenthal Directed by Harold Ramis Running time: 103 minutes
Note: Some may consider portions of the following text to be spoilers. Be forewarned.
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Harold Ramis' comedy ANALYZE THIS is a film whose central conceit winds up being more interesting than its screen realisation. Lampooning mafioso stereotypes with abandon, the picture runs out of gas fairly early on and lurches the remainder of the way to the finish line.
With the public's fascination with the dangerous glamour of organized crime reaching the level where media saturation on the topic has made the John Gotti-led Gambino crime family as fabled and familiar to the masses as the Corleones, it was inevitable that accompanying cinematic attention to the Mafia would ultimately lead to the evolution of an unlikely film sub-genre -- the mob comedy. Joining Andrew Fleming's THE FRESHMAN and Jim Abraham's unfortunate MAFIA! in this category is ANALYZE THIS, which attacks one of the more curious what-if scenarios of late (though not *singularly* curious -- I understand that there's a new HBO series operating on the same basic premise): what if a mob boss was stricken with panic attacks and enlisted the services of a psychiatrist?
Billy Crystal, adorning the requisite shrink beard, plays the doctor and Robert De Niro lends his iconic status as the angst-ridden gangster who finds his life as fearsome New York mob boss Paul Vitti increasingly crippled by his volatile emotional state. An inability to brutally bash in a turncoat's head with a steel pipe? Can't perform in bed? For a macho overlord whose dominance over the Big Apple is threatened by a rival mobster (Chazz Palminteri), this simply will not do. And becoming teary-eyed at sentimental commercials? Unforgivable.
Vitti commandeers the unwilling services of Crystal's mild-mannered Dr. Ben Sobel at a rather inopportune time -- the shrink is headed on vacation to Miami where he's scheduled to marry reporter Laura MacNamara (Lisa Kudrow). After this setup, the Florida-based segment of this film mostly plays like a Mafia-tinged version of WHAT ABOUT BOB?, where the befuddled Sobel is constantly hounded by his demanding new patient who continues to appear at the most inappropriate moments. Of course, fitting the stature of a crime boss, it's not Vitti himself who pesters Sobel -- his dim, sad-eyed right-hand man Jelly (Joe Viterelli) is the one to break into the shrink's hotel room and haul him out of bed in the middle of the night.
The culture clash between the hardened world of the mob and Sobel's suburbanite is often amusing, and there are several funny comic routines and sight gags, but it gradually becomes apparent that the film is content to skewer the Mafia in a series of repetitive riffs, toying with the tough, family-loving, God-fearing, honour-bound archetype familiar from the movies; the picture establishes a rhythm which plays itself out quickly. On the flip side, although hinting at it on several occasions (at one point, when instructed to be vague, Sobel notes that his profession has left him well-equipped for imprecision), the picture fails to add a little variety to the comedy by doing little to send-up the psychiatric profession, and indeed winds up endorsing mushy therapeutic cliches during the story's uninvolving resolution, dulling the carefree irreverence of the picture.
Beyond its premise, the film doesn't really have much of a compelling story to speak of, and what that there is evolves in the weaker latter half of the picture as the action shifts back to New York. It's mostly routine and uncompelling material -- FBI stings, mob summits, yet *more* goofy wedding ceremony fiascoes (a tired gag which has been pretty much been run into the ground) and serves as a rather flimsy hanger upon which to float more comic bits. Howard Shore attempts to inject energy into the piece with a jaunty score which only serves to underline how muddled the film has become.
While De Niro demonstrates his good sportsmanship in the picture through his cheerfully straight portrayal of the stressed mob boss, Kudrow's imitable quirkiness is largely wasted in a tiny, generic role, and Palminteri's saddled with a two-dimensional character he could play in his sleep. On the other hand, it's been so long since his heyday with WHEN HARRY MET SALLY... and CITY SLICKERS that I'd begun to actually forget about Crystal as a solid screen comedian and found myself thinking of him mostly as The Guy Who Knows How To Host The Oscars. In the final reel of ANALYZE THIS, he gets to shed the second banana role worn throughout the bulk of the picture to deliver one of his best onscreen moments in quite some time. The result was silly and predictable, but it had me chuckling.
[ ** 1/2 (out of four stars) | Alternate Rating: C+ ]
- Alex Fung, March 28, 1999
email: aw220@freenet.carleton.ca
web : http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/~aw220/
-- Alex Fung (aw220@freenet.carleton.ca) | http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/~aw220/ "X-FILES fans come up to me in malls expecting me to be able to fill them in on the whole conspiracy. Half the time I have no idea what they're talking about." - Martin Landau
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