Life's not dolce for Vitti

Analyze This (15)

NEW York mob boss Paul Vitti (Robert De Niro) is coming apart at the seams. Fluttery panic attacks plague his day, impotence blights his nights, and to top it all there's a rival mobster (Chazz Palminteri) busy muscling in on his turf. Relaxing at home, he finds himself reduced to tears by the most saccharine of TV commercials.

All, clearly, is not well in the ordered lifestyle of Vitti, at least until a chance meeting hooks him up with psychiatrist Ben Sobel (Billy Crystal) and two mutually exclusive worlds come smacking noisily together.

Before long, Vitti is demanding round-the-clock counselling, eventually pursuing Sobel to Miami where a subsequent shoot-out disrupts the shrink's scheduled wedding to his TV broadcaster fiancee Laura, brittly played by Lisa Kudrow.

So we sit there in the dark and we scrutinise Analyze This. Looks simple enough, doesn't it, with its trim structure, crisp dialogue and good-looking set-design. It seems to be the very model of the well-adjusted, mainstream Hollywood comedy.

Except that first appearances can be deceptive. Dig behind the faade, and it becomes evident that Harold Ramis' film is born out of an eccentric, mongrel heritage. It's a genre-hybrid, a genetic cocktail; a film so subtly self-referential that it's practically ingesting itself.

In years to come we might even regard it as the pioneer of a whole new breed of comedy-thriller. On the big screen, it's two-prong style looks all but unique.

On TV, it has a crucial stablemate in Channel Four's similarly themed (if dramatically superior) The Sopranos.

What both works do is effect a neat marriage of the two cultural cliches most commonly associated with their New York setting. They put mobsterism on the psychiatrists' couch.

So De Niro sits in front of Crystal and frowningly tries to come to grips with a view of the world that is hopelessly at odds with his ritualised, law-of-the-jungle upbringing. And Crystal, for his part, hacks away at the reasoned, intellectual trappings he's built up around himself to reacquaint himself with the red-blooded man inside.

You could call it a shotgun-wedding of Martin Scorsese with Woody Allen, or a reconciliation of the twin tensions at work within modern America (intellectualism and the man of action). Either way, it's a neat trick.

The trouble is that Analyze This is ultimately more radical as a concept than as an organic whole. In all other respects, this makes for a spick-and-span, shiny-surface formula romp.

De Niro reprises his successfully deadpan, bemused role from Martin Brest's underrated Midnight Run, while Crystal manages to keep his harassed shrink appropriately nervous and uptight.

Elsewhere, though, there's thin pickings for the supporting cast. In true odd-couple fashion, Ramis appears so fixated on his headline stars that he lets the other elements idle.

Kudrow can do little more than look on from the sidelines, and the normally excellent Palminteri is reduced to little more than a series of knee-jerk Mafioso gestures.

Judged on face value, Analyze This is a bracingly played, mildly funny sitcom. A psychological portrait reveals the true novelty of its conception.

Xan Brooks

Copyright 1999
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