For our summer-stupid season, a sequel not quite so bad as it first seemed, especially worthwhile today for its incisive peek at New York brio in responding to 9/11
If you like or really love Analyze This (1999), you would probably want to watch, if no more than once, its 2002 sequel, Analyze That. Paul Vitti (played by Robert De Niro) is still in jail—he’s been there two and a half years (with the time between the movies echoing the time in the story), and he’s getting what seems to be more cause for worry than his previous Mafia life on the street had made routine for him: as he is in jail, there is a conspiracy to do him in, involving inmates and even prison staff.
If you like or really love Analyze This (1999), you would probably want to watch, if no more than once, its 2002 sequel, Analyze That. Paul Vitti (played by Robert De Niro) is still in jail—he’s been there two and a half years (with the time between the movies echoing the time in the story), and he’s getting what seems to be more cause for worry than his previous Mafia life on the street had made routine for him: as he is in jail, there is a conspiracy to do him in, involving inmates and even prison staff.
Psych elements bring clinical fun early in the movie
So he fakes insanity, and for health reasons, amid somewhat complex story-premise setting, he is released…into the custody of Billy Crystal’s character Dr. Ben Sobel, whom Vitti (in light of their previous relationship) has already tried phoning, and who also happens to be the only psychiatric professional who knows Vitti’s past case so well. Yet Vitti’s legal status—and risk of getting back into trouble if he is free on the street again—leads an FBI honcho to require Dr. Sobel, as Vitti’s custodian, to be an approved “temporary federal institution.” All this background, I think, is handled pretty well within the movie’s more careful first half (if it may seem dry to some).
This FBI-birthed arrangement happens to end up complete with a room for Vitti in Dr. Sobel’s house and the potential for tacky late-night behavior with a visiting prostitute… and, next morning, highly unseemly behavior by Mr. Vitti in front of attendees of a Jewish breakfast. (Here, the movie’s humor being crasser than that of Analyze This reaches its height, or nadir.)
The early exposition involving how Vitti is assessed as showing “brief psychotic disorder,” which could possibly presage longer-term schizophreniform disorder (unless precipitating stressors are removed), is presented pretty cogently. And people familiar with psychiatric and psychological “tools” will find interest in Dr. Sobel’s use with Vitti of a card of the Rorschach (“ink blot”) test and a picture card from the Thematic Apperception Test (real cards from both tests were not used, for professional reasons). There is also a test of arraying colored blocks from the Wechsler IQ (“WAIS”) test. Even a scene in a doctor’s examining room, with Dr. Sobel physically testing Vitti when the latter is in an apparent catatonic stupor, has its fun aspects. Supposedly De Niro had gone to observe patients at a psychiatric facility to see how to feign psychiatric disorder, which was inspired by the real-life past oddity of mobster Vincent Gigante.
Thus starts a movie that features many of the players behind the first movie: actors Crystal and De Niro; Lisa Kudrow as Dr. Sobel’s long-suffering wife Laura; Kyle Sabihy as Dr. Sobel’s son Michael (now with deepened voice); Joe Viterelli as Vitti’s loyal assistant Jelly; director Harold Ramis (I’ll note some things on him below); and, as producer for this film while he had been a consultant on Analyze This, Barry Levinson (who directed Diner [1982] and Rain Man [1988]). Not insignificantly, Analyze This made a lot of profit while Analyze That lost money.
Back on the street, the movie loses steam
Psych-related premises out of the way, Mr. Vitti and Dr. Sobel embark on some of the same escapades as complementary and yet frictional duo they were in the first movie. I think this interplay of artless Mafia don and anguishing psychiatrist can be fun stuff, if at some moments the premise seems a little “old” in the sequel. This interpersonal setup adds to the first half of the film’s being enlivened by the comedy, street-smart exchanges, and tightly edited story development that are germane to reconstituting this relationship.
However, the second half of the movie largely entails a major part of the plot, which is that Vitti, once he is released from prison, becomes a “wild card” in a situation in which his old Mafia family, now run by Patty Lopresti [sp?] (played by Cathy Moriarty-Gentile), the wife of a don who had been killed, is at odds with another family, that of Lou “The Wrench” Rigazzi, which is vying with Vitti’s old family for, I guess, control of all Mafia interests in the New York area.
Vitti manages to scout up his old comrade Jelly, and is something of a groping freelancer as he, at first, tries to keep legitimate (but small-time) jobs, and tires of this. Then he gets involved in the production of a TV series on mobsters, Little Caesar, inspired by the recent real-life hit The Sopranos, and his consultant work for this show becomes a sort of cover for Vitti as he pursues his real plot. Is he going back to a life of crime, including the major larceny of robbing gold from a Manhattan gold depository? Actually, what he’s doing is more sly, and shows him actually trying to turn over a new leaf: he is robbing the gold, but will plant it on Rigazzi’s family, in order to put that Mafia family out of business.
For those who thrive on Mafia stories, this all may have some appeal, or it may seem old. But what is interesting to me about this movie is what it never really states, though it is pretty clear as a background mood-setter and “source of some meaning” for the movie, suggested especially in background scenes, and most pointedly in a waterfront scene at the end (which is otherwise marred by a corny invocation of West Side Story): 9/11 happened about a year before this movie was released, and New York’s need to show its can-do pride and good-faith-beneath-street-tough nature is reflected in the movie’s story and some of its mood and production elements.
The movie was rushed through production—filming appears to have started in early spring 2002, and the movie was released within December 2002, which is an unusually quick production/post-production period for a major feature film. The haste may be suggested in the rather crassly dropped-in music that is a repeated theme of this film—not the well-crafted, gentle jazz of the first film, but a sort of tacky strip-club dance music with insistent texture and ominous chords. And what more often occurs in Analyze That as little "underscore" musical fills is electric piano/synthesizer stuff that is not nearly as much fun as the Louie Prima pop/jazz that enlivens the opening and closing credits of the first film.
While the first film seemed refreshingly original, this one has the negative aspects of echoing certain plot features and structures of exchanges of the first film, as well as the derivative addition of its nod to The Sopranos in using a parody of that show as a plot element.
And yet…
The 9/11 side, in retrospect, gives this movie a sort of nostalgic charm it didn’t have at first
On the one hand, 9/11, historically, could be said to have had the biggest, harshest effect on the cultural quality of this film when it was released—at the time we could have asked, Do we take in a disappointing Analyze This retread that makes a sort of banal cheerleading move in featuring spirited guys meeting (and singing!) on a New York waterfront? On the other hand, I think that, today, the 9/11-reflecting feature (if not the schlocky West Side Story themes—popping up several times in the story) can give the film its greatest interest to modern viewers.
Even in the more complex story elements, Paul Vitti and Dr. Sobel play out their (at-times silly-sided) drama amid the backdrop of legal authorities breathing down their necks and a simmering under-layer of New York crime, both of which seem to echo (somewhat crudely, on the one hand, but showing a sort of good-faith “honoring” on the other) national government facing the threat of insidious terrorism. While in Analyze This, the FBI looked like too-stiff meddlers who deserved the foiling that came to them at one point, in Analyze That the FBI seems basically “our guys,” in tone symbolized by the confidence-inspiring talking head who turns up baritone-voiced, with good news, on a TV screen near the end of the film. And Vitti himself, foiling the big beast of the Rigazzi family, seems almost like a lovable hometown Shmoe, or a local firefighter, doing his part to help the country mend post 9/11.
The fact that the gold-stealing scene involves construction site and machinery, including a giant crane, that seem to smell of 9/11-region mitigation suggests that the movie may have used such local “furnishings” for reasons of convenience, while this “happenstance” today gives a nice reminder of how can-do in an emergency America could be, in getting honestly back on its feet, in fall 2001 through most of 2002.
Where have you gone, sobered post-9/11 optimism? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you (apologies to Paul Simon).
Notes on director Ramis
Ramis, early in his career, was an associate of the likes of Bill Murray and the Second City/National Lampoon crew (I’m not experts on these latter), and he is handy with humor with an intelligent, irreverent edge (though with the Analyze movies he seems to employ a lot of artfulness in balancing the different influences of Crystal and De Niro, plus having a Mafia story work with a humorous edge without seeming hackneyed or stupid).
