Analyze This

Starring Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal

"Donning" his native Italian accent and adding a pinch of Brooklynese, Robert De Niro returns to his mafia roots, dragging along Billy Crystal in Harold Ramis' "Analyze This," a successful attempt at pairing two familiar actors and harping on their eccentricities.

The film places Robert De Niro in the role of Paul Vitti, head of a New York crime family in a compromising situation: he is experiencing anxiety attacks. His best friend gets whacked by a rival crime family (headed by Chazz Palminteri), who will also be attending a mafia don meeting that De Niro is afraid of attending. In the midst of all this, Billy Crystal, plays Dr. Ben Sobel, a middle-aged psychiatrist with a smart-mouth son, a father with a name he will never live up to, and a fiancé who is preparing for their wedding. He meets an "associate" of Vitti's in a fender-bender. As soon as Crystal passes over his business card, he signs over his life to the mob. Soon, Crystal is losing his time to an imposing client, and as the shenanigans get more consequential, the harder it is for Crystal to pull out of his deal. It's not easy to cure a patient who doesn't know he's sick. Making session progress while kidnapping, assigning hits, and interrogating doublecrossers is no piece of cake either. As the scales are tipped, De Niro's life gets better, while Crystal's lies in ruins.

As all of this is going on, we get the special treats which the movie unflinchingly pounds into our heads: De Niro playing off of Crystal in no holds barred shrink-sessions, which are as funny as they get. It is difficult to explain how funny these situations are - it's enough to say that it's worth the price of admission to see De Niro cry. De Niro is no stranger to his role, since he is spoofing his past roles in mafia films such as "The Godfather Part II" and "Goodfellas." It's a role not unlike that of Marlon Brando's in "The Freshman," another recommended film, in which he spoofs his role in "The Godfather." De Niro is also no stranger to the realm of comedy, with both "The King of Comedy" as well as "Wag the Dog" under his belt. What De Niro brings to the comic characters that he plays is a psychological flaw, which is a valid acting method with regard to comedy. The only way for an actor to be funny is to make himself the odd man out; there must be something wrong with him. In this case it's the failure to think outside of his close-minded desensitized mafia life. He's the nromal one and everyone else is crazy. Similarly, stand-up comedians always talk about how odd such and such a topic is. It's a traditional method that works. The polar opposite of this type of comedy, the opposite of what De Niro does is deadpan comedy. That's exactly what Crystal does and is famous for. He's the normal receptacle of the abnormal; the sarcastic voice of reason in a play of the absurd.

The fact that De Niro and Crystal have such great timing while playing off each other is the luck of the draw. Coincidentally, the two actors were quite hesitant to work with each other for the fear of backfiring when combining De Niro's serious type with Crystal's softer side. The fact that the film worked so well is pure chance, since Harold Ramis has always been walking the tightrope between having a hit or a miss. He's written and directed hits like "Animal House," "Caddyshack" and "Groundhog Day," yet he's had his misses with "Multiplicity," "Club Paradise," and "Stuart Saves His Family." Though most of the film's secondary characters are composites of cardboard and styrofoam, with the exception of De Niro's associate "Jelly," what makes this film so appealing is the fact that you have two icons of Hollywood whose film personalities overstep their roles from film to film, and such familiarity makes this comedy rock solid and refreshing.