Dr. Isaac Barr (Richard Gere), about a third of the way into Final Analysis (1992), tells us “A shoe salesman looks at people’s feet. I look at their thoughts.”  He’s a Freudian psychiatrist probing Diana’s (Uma Thurman) dreams of flower arranging and gun handling for subsumed sexual motivation while letting the trauma of a past sexual assault she hints at flop around the session like a trout suffocating on a dock. 

Directed with a De Palmaniac flair by Phil Joanou (and dodging a loan shark for debts owed to Vertigo), Final Analysis asks who gets the last word on wrongdoing: the perpetrator or the bystander. Kim Basinger enters the plot as Heather, Diana’s sister, ready to provide to Isaac the family backstory Diana is reluctant to reveal in her sessions. Heather and Isaac quickly become lovers, though Heather has not arranged a non-monogamous relationship with Jimmy Evans (Eric Roberts), her “Greek Orthodox gangster” husband. 

“Fucking his wife is like teasing King Kong,” a lawyer friend of Isaac’s says of Jimmy. We are told that Jimmy was born Dimitri Evangelou in Greece, emigrated from Athens at 18 “to avoid the draft,” and presently works in construction, pension fund scams, bid rigging, and money laundering.  Eric Roberts’ tanned, toned form is coiled tight, making him the ideal heartthrob for the folks who eroticise tangles of copper wire. His introductory scene in the film concludes with Heather fellating him under strongly implied physical threat.  

Coiled tight

The foundation of Final Analysis is a set of assumptions about the world it seeks to portray. One is that corruption and violence are not abhorrent enough in and of themselves. Another is that the phrase “Greek Orthodox” evokes otherness and that otherness naturally evokes danger. If one wishes to make a connection between these two assumptions, Final Analysis is not preventing one from doing so. However, it must be said that Eric Roberts is nowhere near as hairy nor tall as King Kong and that the comparison is an inappropriate one. 

Where Jimmy is a threat to Heather (and Isaac and Diana by their association with her), one can’t help feel that both Heather and Diana are not exactly safe with Isaac either. He boasts to a buddy of Diana, “I have an attractive-seductive young woman for a patient!” The same buddy–he is a psychological expert Heather will call on later–loudly declares “No woman is so beautiful your normal thought processes fly out of your head” just as Heather walks into the room and he subsequently loses his train of thought. Heather and Diana are portrayed as desired objects for the men around them and it is not a stretch that if they are able to escape the clutches of Jimmy, Isaac and his cronies are not going to be much help afterwards. 

Pathological intoxication

Heather kills Jimmy during a spell of pathological intoxication, a crime for which she is found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity thanks to the testimony of Isaac and the psychological expert buddy, as well as his lawyer friend’s defence. Isaac then learns that Heather is to receive a giant insurance pay-out and suspects she may have pre-meditated the murder of Jimmy all along. At this point, the questions of ‘do all murders need to be avenged?’ and ‘do I really want to watch the rest of this movie?’ fuel the engine of the second half of the film. Isaac elects to sort out Heather’s plot, less so out of an obligation to pursue justice for Jimmy than his need to avenge his humiliation at being so manipulated by a woman. Heather living out her days with a tidy insurance sum and free of a dangerous asshole is a happy ending for a film meant for children. Final Analysis’ gaze is directed toward sleek, grown-up problems, not fairy tales about financial security and freedom from violence. 

The film’s real-world point-of-view is that men are excused of a lack of control when it comes to beautiful women and said beautiful women are not equally excused taking advantage of that lack of control. And women deserve to be punished if they manipulate you into helping their perverse campaign for freedom. That the word ‘dumbbell’ – the object itself is a plot McGruffin – is used to excess in the dialogue underscores the stupefying wonder to behold in Isaac’s effort to reclaim his manhood. Final Analysis boasts a shattering thesis: it is easier to concoct a two-year plot to manipulate a dumbbell mental health professional to justify you killing your husband than it is to count on the economic, social and legal support needed to successfully leave an abusive relationship. 

Originally published on January 9, 2019.

Updated on January 22, 2019 to included new post category and tags.