Taglines: A psychiatrist and two beautiful sisters playing the ultimate mind game.
Final Analysis movie storyline. A psychiatrist (Gere) has an affair with his patient’s sister (Basinger) who is married to a Greek mobster (Roberts). The mobster is a tyrant over his wife. The psychiatrist wants her to get a divorce, but she is afraid of what her husband would do. She has a medical condition that becomes apparent when she drinks. One night she drinks anyway and attacks her husband. The psychiatrist uses his professional pull to try and help her out of the consequences of her actions, but becomes uncertain if she is telling him the truth.
Final Analysis is a 1992 American neo-noir drama directed by Phil Joanou and written by Wesley Strick. It stars Richard Gere, Kim Basinger, Uma Thurman, Eric Roberts, Paul Guilfoyle, Keith David, Rita Zohar, Katherine Cortez, George Murdock and Shirley Prestia. The executive producers were Gere and Maggie Wilde. The neo-noir style of Final Analysis imitates Hitchcockian thrillers like Vertigo.
Filming locations included City Hall in Downtown Los Angeles, California. The first week’s gross was $6,411,441 and the total receipts for the film’s run were $28,590,665. In its widest release the film was featured in 1,504 theaters across the United States.
Film Review for Final Analysis
“Final Analysis,” an implausible psycho thriller with Kim Basinger, Uma Thurman and Richard Gere, has so many twists, turns and backward leaps, the actors tackle their work like trained poodles in a circus act. Written by “Cape Fear’s” Wesley Strick, the sexy scenario plays the three lookers off against each other in a maze of mind games with a moral courtesy of “Fatal Attraction.”
Gere is not anybody’s idea of a psychotherapist, but he is the movie’s executive producer. Both cute and caring in the role of Isaac Barr, he is a self-possessed psychiatrist who can read people so readily he “just wants to be surprised.” The incredible head-shrinking man is soon caught unawares — and without pants — in a web spun by a seductive patient, Diana (Thurman), and her irresistible sister, Heather (Basinger). Like Barbra Streisand, and others in movie mental health, the doctor has a teensy problem with medical ethics. But he convinces himself that there’s no law against sleeping with a patient’s relatives. Never mind that Diana has confided that she is a creepy caterpillar, while Heather is a butterfly — not to mention a married butterfly.
Isaac can’t stop himself because he’s a man who hasn’t had a date in a while and Heather’s not only beautiful, she’s trapped in an abusive marriage with a pinwheel-eyed racketeer (Eric Roberts). His friends and colleagues try to talk some sense into Isaac: “Fooling around with his wife is like teasing King Kong,” says one. “A shrink with a weakness for unhappy women is a cliche,” observes another. But he is so crazy in love, he not only indulges in unsafe sex with Heather, but also antagonizes her psychotic husband.
Meanwhile, jealous sister Diana has taken to carrying a pistol to her sessions with Isaac. Then Heather starts to manifest symptoms of a weird movie disease called “pathological intoxication” — she becomes insanely drunk on anything stronger than Scope. All the makings for a six-sided love triangle are now in place and that’s not counting the odd man out — Barr’s lawyer, a legal hot dog played with relish, ketchup and mustard by Paul Guilfoyle, who wastes no time taking this project seriously.
He realizes, even if nobody else does, that “Final Analysis” is an unintentional sendup of Hitchcock. Bits of dialogue will be familiar to fans of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” as will the look of the production, particularly the abandoned lighthouse that stands in for the chapel tower where another Kim likewise flirted with disaster. (Sometimes a lighthouse is just a lighthouse — yeah really.) Maybe director Phil Joanou meant it as a homage to the master of suspense, or maybe he just doesn’t have any of his own ideas.
But at least this film has a reasonable pace, several enjoyable performances and such unforgettable lines as this one delivered by Heather’s hubby over dinner in a fancy restaurant: “Hey, look at me chewing on a pancreas.” In the “Final Analysis,” we can only conclude it’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world.
Final Analysis (1992)
Directed by: Phil Joanou
Starring: Richard Gere, Kim Basinger, Uma Thurman, Eric Roberts, Paul Guilfoyle, Keith David, Rita Zohar, Katherine Cortez, George Murdock, Shirley Prestia
Screenplay by: Wesley Strick
Production Design by: Dean Tavoularis
Cinematography by: Jordan Cronenweth
Film Editing by: Thom Noble
Costume Design by: Aude Bronson-Howard
Set Decoration by: Robert Nelson
Art Direction by: Angelo P. Graham
Music by: George Fenton
MPAA Rating: R for a scene of strong sensuality, and for language and violence.
Distributed by: Warner Bros. Pictures
Release Date: February 7, 1992
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