Final Analysis

Warner. Director Phil Joanou; Producer Charles Roven, Paul Junger Witt, Tony Thomas; Screenplay Wesley Strick; Camera Jordan Cronenweth; Editor Thom Noble; Music George Fenton; Art Director Dean Tavoularis

Richard Gere
Kim Basinger
Uma Thurman
Eric Roberts
Paul Guilfoyle
Keith David

Final Analysis is a crackling good psychological melodrama [from a screen story by Robert Berger and Wesley Strick] in which star power and slick surfaces are used to potent advantage. Tantalizing double-crosses mount right up to the eerie final scene.

In the course of treating a patient (Uma Thurman), San Francisco psychiatrist Richard Gere takes the unusual step of meeting the young woman's older sister, who may know more about certain events in Thurman's past than the subject herself.

Sis turns out to be Kim Basinger, who has no trouble overcoming his tenuous sense of professional ethics about bedding a patient's sibling. An aloof workaholic, Gere becomes hopelessly ensnared in his secret affair with Basinger, who in turn promises to find a way out of her marriage. Sympathies ride with her in a murder trial but with the trial's conclusion Basinger assumes the full dimensions of a Warner Bros. bad girl that Joan Crawford would have killed to play.

Greatest hurdle for some viewers may be getting past the idea of Gere as a respected psychiatrist, and the intellectual side of his character is shortchanged. Similarly, Basinger is mostly surface effect, but it's considerable here. Her wardrobe is stunning.

Physical production is one of the film's major stars, as lenser and production designer have conspired to create a darkly shadowed, outrageously attractive world that outdoes even San Francisco's natural beauties.

(Color) Available on VHS, DVD. Extract of a review from 1992. Running time: 124 MIN.

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