Live Life Team
‘Analyze This’ is hard to define in terms of the typical mafia film. Far from the gritty, violent crime dramas like ‘The Godfather’ or ‘Donnie Brasco’, ‘Analyze This’ is a comedy that seeks to spoof the genre. In retrospect, it seems almost a parody of the mafia-themed television programme ‘The Sopranos’. However, ‘Analyze This’ arrived in theatres months before ‘The Sopranos’ debuted on HBO.
The film stars Billy Crystal and Robert DeNiro. Crystal plays, Ben Sobel, a psychiatrist who has a chance encounter with Mob boss, Paul Vitti, portrayed by DeNiro, whose self-parodying performance is the highlight of this film. When Vitti discovers that Sobel is a psychiatrist, he seeks his help with various issues and it seems that, much like Tony Soprano, Vitti suffers from anxiety attacks. This information would, if made public, damage his standing in the family, so he tries to enlist Sobel’s aid in secret.
Their therapeutic arrangement quickly goes awry, as Vitti demands that he be ‘cured’ of his anxiety before a big meeting with the heads of all the mafia families, just two weeks hence. His treatment of Sobel, as his 24-hour on call personal analyst, leads to constant intrusions of his criminal world into Sobel’s highbrow life and causes considerable consternation to Sobel and his fiancé, played by Lisa Kudrow.
Predictably, it doesn’t take long until Sobel is approached by agents of the Federal Government to spy on his client. It isn’t long before he is caught between the government, Vitti’s gang and the other mob bosses.
