Here's all the analysis you need for "Analyze That."
Fish out of water: Funny. Forever funny.
From left, Alfred Sauchelli Jr., Billy Crystal and Joe Viterelli in "Analyze That."
(Phillip V. Caruso)
|
|
Fish in water: Never funny. What would be funny about it? It's just a fish in, er, water.
"Analyze That" begins with a blast of comic energy as it pursues the classic fish flubbing around on terra firma and then squanders all that laughter and goodwill for a dreary fish-in-H2O thing, wasting Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal's talent and too much of our time. At least they got paid.
It begins where "Analyze This" left off, in prison. De Niro's gangster Paul Vitti is in Sing Sing, where big guys with tattoos resembling cave art keep trying to perforate his liver with sharpened toothbrushes. Crystal's Dr. Ben Sobel may be in a worse joint: his own brain, where the anger he feels at his now-dead father is suffocating him – while outside, in apparently pleasant reality, his shrewish wife (played at full-bitch pitch by Lisa Kudrow) is busy acting as warder. She's so hostile you think maybe she's got a sharpened toothbrush somewhere.
Dr. Sobel, why don't you get your smile back by going on a cattle drive? Oh, right, you already made that movie. In any event, "Analyze That" lurches into its highest comic gear when, by feeble pretext, the feds contrive to have the endangered mobster, who is feigning insanity, paroled into the care of the self-doubting, eminently mild shrink who lives in a pleasant New Jersey neighborhood.
O sole mio, the laughs! De Niro's Vitti is fish Ubermensch, Italian-style, as deposited in the tepid burbs of Jersey. He's so far out of water, it's a wonder his gills don't explode. He curses, he threatens, he punches, he samples the purchased pleasures of the flesh (with a vulgar sleazy prostitute), he eats, he stomps, he smokes. He never moderates. He represents one tribe of man, the utterly spontaneous. He does, says, thinks, eats without a thought, without reflection, without hesitation. You can imagine the chaos such a monster of an id unleashes on any house run by Lisa Kudrow. When he kicks his 'ho out of the bedroom while Dr. Sobel downstairs is conducting a memorial get-together for his undearly departed dad, the results are hysterical. Imagine the enraged Sonny Corleone kicking his way out of a dinner party in a Woody Allen movie.
On the other hand, Dr. Sobel is our friend, the empathetic man. He never feels his own pain, only everybody else's. He can rationalize any behavior except his own. His eyes leak the tears of human kindness. He's been overeducated to the point of profound uselessness. He has lost touch with his physical self, with his hungers, with his strength and his aggression. He needs permission to breathe.
Underneath the shenanigans of a plot that runs out of energy quickly, you can see the psycho-emotional crossed trajectory the movie means to set up but doesn't really deliver. Paul, of course, must learn to moderate somewhat, while Ben must learn to assert somewhat. Each must become a little more like the other guy.
That's interesting, and quickly forgotten in a mess of subplots. One involves Paul's engagement in a gang war – talk about putting the fish back in the water! – and one faction is led by De Niro's old pal from "Raging Bull," Cathy Moriarty (who has added a hyphen and evidently married a Protestant, so that the name now reads "Cathy Moriarty-Gentile"). She still has the same gritty edge as she did in that great American movie, and I wish the film had done more with her. But the whole Mafia thing – the other gang leader does a lame imitation of Brando's muted, phlegmy Godfather voice – is pretty stale.
Another subplot makes what I take to be a jab at "The Sopranos," which shares the gangster-shrink dynamic. Dr. Sobel gets Paul a gig as an adviser to a Mafia-based television show called "Little Caesar": The authentic gangster attempts to mold the performance of the inauthentic one, played by Australian Anthony LaPaglia. De Niro and LaPaglia have almost no comic rapport, and the script cannot come up with any gags for them except the obvious and unfunny. There's also a florid producer named Raoul Berman (Reg Rogers), who may be a version of "Sopranos" creator David Chase. But he may not be. He's clearly somebody, but nobody outside of two screening rooms and one agency on either coast will know who.
The movie just goes nowhere. It's stuck in that no man's land between comedy and banal movie mob action, and it delivers on neither of these impulses with any force. The filmmakers also make a serious tactical error in separating Crystal and De Niro through most of the second half. Alone, neither is half as funny as they are together. For gangsters with funny problems and a whiny shrink, I'll take the great Tony S. any day of the week.
ANALYZE THAT (R, 95 minutes) – Contains profanity and mild violence. At area theaters.
