Analyze This

Analyze This

“Do you have any idea who I am?” the gangster asks his therapist.

“Yes, I do.” “No, you don’t.” “No, I don’t.” The psychiatrist is all too eager to please Paul Vitti, chief of a New York crime syndicate. However, Vitti is in a bind: He’s lost his way; he’s having panic attacks; he weeps during sappy TV commercials. If his enemies find out, he’s dead.

A situation comedy like this depends on casting to lift it above the level of sitcom, and ”Analyze This” has Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal to lend depth to the characters. It also has a big lug named Joe Viterelli, as a bodyguard named Jelly who tries dimly to understand why the most feared criminal in America needs help from this little head doctor.

”Analyze This” is funny in part because De Niro and Crystal do what we expect them to do, and in part because they don’t. De Niro kids his screen image from all those mob movies by Martin Scorsese and others, paying the psychiatrist compliments he cannot refuse.

“You’re good.” “Well, I” “No! You’re good!” “I’m good.” Crystal’s character, named Ben Sobol, is the type of guy who figures if he can just keep talking sooner or later he’ll say something right. What we don’t expect is that the characters take on a certain human dimension, and we care for them a little bit. This isn’t great involving human drama here but there are personalities involved and it isn’t all gag lines.

Of course there has to be a Meet Cute between Ben Sobol and the mobsters; it takes place when Sobol rams into another car while backing out of his driveway with an extra passenger (in fact Jelly) in its trunk. The gangsters are only too happy to forget the incident, even though Crystal wants to call the cops; eventually Jelly takes the psychiatrist’s card, and still has it in his pocket when Vitti needs help.

Vitti’s nemesis is a mobster named Primo Sindone (Chazz Palminteri), who would move against him if he had any inkling of his weaknesses. That’s why absolute secrecy is necessary, and why Sobol is appalled when he discovers his son eavesdropping on their sessions. “You can’t tell a single person!” he shouts at the kid. “You mean,” says the kid, “take it off the Internet?” Sobol is a divorced man about to remarry (to Lisa Kudrow), but even in the middle of the wedding Jelly comes for him, and it begins to look like he’s a mobster himself to his fiancee’s parents.

When he needs to, Crystal can go over the top, but in this movie he wisely restrains his manic side and gets into a nice rhythm with De Niro’s fearful gangster. The film fills around them with reasonably lively violence (the shrink himself at one point winds up in a shark tank), but many of the mob scenes are satires of “The Godfather” and its clones. There’s even a dream sequence where the psychiatrist visualizes himself being shot in the street just like Don Vito Corleone was in the film, with Vitti too slow to save him.

He tells Vitti about the dream. I was Fredo?” Vitti says. I don’t think so.” The director and co-writer is Harold Ramis, whose work ranges from broad comedy like Caddyshack” to the fine tuned observation of Groundhog Day.” Here he could have been tempted, I suppose, to overplay the De Niro character and turn the movie into an Airplane!” type satire of gangster movies. I think he finds the right path allowing satire, referring to De Niro’s screen past, but keeping the focus on the strange friendship between two men who speak entirely different languages.

(When Sobol explains Freud’s theory that some men subconsciously want to kill their fathers and marry their mothers, Vitti’s response is to the point: You ever seen my mother?”) A movie like this will be thought of almost entirely in terms of De Niro and Crystal, with a nod to Palminteri and Kudrow, and yet I think what holds it together is Jelly’s unexpectedly likable character.

Joe Viterelli makes the bodyguard not just another mobster or tough guy but an older man who is weary after many years in service; loyal to his boss and patient with his weird nesses. As Jelly quietly pads around coping with the alarming news that his boss is cracking up and seeing a shrink, he adds a quiet dimension to the movie; he gives Vitti someone to relate to. The comedy here isn’t all on the surface, and Viterelli is one reason why.

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