Analyze This

viewed November 15, 1999 on video

For full information about this film, click here

Robert DeNiro, easily one of the best actors of the 70s, pretty much went downhill after Raging Bull.  It's as if that movie drained him of discipline and nuance -- as much as it was one of the best pieces of acting on screen, it was also one of the most over the top.  And he's been over the top ever since.  Is this movie Robert DeNiro's way of laughing at the typecast fate of his career and the subsequent winnowing effects on his talent?  As much fun as this movie is at times, it's kind of sad to see how easy it is for him to walk through this role with hardly anything even ironic to add.  When Brando spoofed his Godfather role in The Freshman, he was spoofing a masterpiece of acting.  DeNiro here is spoofing his own pathetic excuse of a career.

Like with the cowboys in City Slickers, Billy Crystal has managed, with an arsenal of stereotypes, to domesticize and cuten the gangsters that supposedly threaten his psychologist protagonist.  The threat is never real because Crystal's life, especially his son and fiancee (Lisa Kudrow, who really deserves better roles than this), are hardly convincing.  But what do you expect from Crystal except to be entertained by the improbable?  He delivers the goods when he's wisecracking his way out of dire situations, like his forebear, Bugs Bunny.  When the material begs him to get touchy-feely with DeNiro's gangster, we start treading the yuppie moralist muck that made Father's Day so unbearable, only this time we have Freud thrown in for good measure.  A gangster getting soft has a lot of comic potential, and they were getting it right at first, having DeNiro's breakdowns played for laughs (I had thought the way DeNiro sobs was awfully fake, but maybe that was the point -- it's so awkward that it's hilarious), but at last they take themselves too seriously.  

The movie is good when it's having fun with itself and the genre it's spoofing, a prime example being the Godfather dream sequence, in which Crystal plays Brando and DeNiro is Fredo.  Every detail is matched, including the sepia tones and the sound of a trumpet being practiced somewhere offscreen.  You can tell in that one scene that they were having fun with the genre while treating the original with the utmost reverence.  It's a lot more inspired than the petty stereotypes and psychobabble we sit through the rest of the way. 

Read Roger Ebert's review here

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