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ANALYZE THAT by Tom McCurrie
Steve Martin once said that comedy is not pretty. After seeing ANALYZE THAT, you know exactly what he means.
(Warning: Spoilers Ahead!)
Now comedy is a very subjective genre. What's funny to me may be carpenter nails through the eyelids to somebody else. But unless you're doing a sketch film, a feature-length comedy still needs a plot that lasts, well, feature-length.
Think of your plot as a horse in the Belmont Stakes. It has to make it around the whole track if you're gonna succeed. If that nag drops dead at the halfway mark, the audience is not going to be happy, since their suspension of disbelief and emotional identification will end well before the movie does.
Perfect example? ANALYZE THAT, written by Peter Steinfeld, Harold Ramis and Peter Tolan. The script begins promisingly enough with mob boss De Niro finagling his way out of Sing Sing and into the home of his favorite shrink, Billy Crystal. Someone was looking to whack De Niro in the joint, so he figured he'd be safer hanging with Crystal in the 'burbs.
OK, so now we have the "Living with your Favorite Mobster" plot. It's as funny as it goes, but it doesn't go very far. How many times can you have goombah De Niro curse in front of Crystal's elderly relatives for laughs?
The writers realize this plot can't sustain the movie so they get De Niro out of house arrest to look for a "normal" job. This is amusing, too...for about three and a half seconds. De Niro flubbing it as a car salesman, a jeweler and a Majordomo soon grows monotonous -- yeah, we get it, he can't handle nine-to-five. This second plot is also too thin and must be abandoned.
De Niro then stumbles into another gig -- chief technical advisor on a "Sopranos"-like TV show. This is the most amusing plot of them all, since it sends up Mafia (and Hollywood) cliches with relish. But De Niro cracking wise about fake Hollywood gangsters does not a feature make.
So we get one final plot for our ticket price. This one has to do with De Niro staging a gold heist. By this time there've been so many plots you start to wonder whether the script should be diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. The scattered storyline keeps us off-balance, wondering how and where we should invest our emotion. After all, if we get hot and heavy into one plot strand, how do we know it won't fade away in fifteen minutes to be replaced by something else? Rather than worry about this, we tune out of the movie altogether.
On the upside, the gold heist ends in a rather cool twist. De Niro actually robbed the gold to set-up the gangsters who were trying to waste him in the first reel. But this isn't enough to keep the disparate plots from pulling the movie apart.
The original ANALYZE THIS had one very strong plot. A shrink is shanghaied into treating a mob boss. A simple premise, but one meaty enough to carry the entire feature. De Niro struggles with his mental problems, and Crystal tries to survive De Niro struggling with his mental problems.
But in ANALYZE THAT De Niro is cured; his arc has been completed. The sequel's solution is to give Crystal the arc instead; he learns to vent the hatred he's always had for his father. But since a shrink having mental problems isn't nearly as humorous a conceit as a mobster having them, Crystal's arc isn't as compelling, and thus fails to sustain our interest over the long haul.
So make sure you don't pick a plot that's too thin. After all, a script that makes it to the finish line is a script that's likely to sell.
Responses, comments and general two-cents worth can be E-mailed to gillis662000@yahoo.com.
A graduate of USC's School of Cinema-Television, Tom McCurrie has worked as a development executive and a story analyst. He is currently a screenwriter living in Los Angeles.
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