Tepid romantic comedy, in the New York style. It wants to take up residence in a certain situation, but doesn't want to do the construction work necessary to put it there. The desired situation is a middle-aged Manhattan psychoanalyst becoming amorously obsessed with a twenty-ish patient, and risking everything for a bit of "countertransference." Neither her psychological ailment nor his couchside manner is well enough established that we can understand the attraction on either side. And in any case, with characteristic New York fickleness, the movie continually turns its attention to other fashionable topics. (Marshall Brickman, the writer and director, has been a past collaborator of Woody Allen's, and somehow we keep expecting sophistication.) The patient is never believable as a promising young playwright, but this facet of her personality provides contact with the Broadway theater scene, and especially with a moody, egotistical, Al Pacino-ish actor (Ron Silver). The analyst's wife never becomes an important presence, but a couple of brief appearances give us entrée into the SoHo art scene (with Larry Rivers as the stereotypically mad artist). Psychiatry, however, remains the prime focus of interest, or prime source of stock jokes. And frequent fantasy scenes enable the hero to chat things over with Sigmund Freud himself (Alec Guinness). Many people in Western culture, denied access to the Reader's Digest or Ladies' Home Journal, are perhaps no better acquainted with Freud than Marshall Brickman appears to be; but they therefore do not presume to write a script about him, either. Dudley Moore, Elizabeth McGovern, John Huston. (1983) — Duncan Shepherd
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