Word: lovesick
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...LOVESICK leaves the viewer like a partygoer with an empty stomach, stuffed with a vast array of reheated gimmicks from other movies but still lacking a satisfying main course. This latest Hollywood release stars Dudley Moore as another New York psychiatrist who falls in love with his lovely neurotic patient (Elizabeth McGovern) to the accompaniment of innumerable cute gimmicky scenes. In both content and style, the material proves merely a rehash of past comedies, romantic comedies, and comedies about psychiatry...
...breaches in psychiatric practice as well as his own unstable state of mind. Freud's witty, satirical comments do not ring true, though; instead, they remind us of Humphrey Bogart's advice to Woody Allen throughout Play It Again, Sam. Similar takeoffs from other films dot the rest of Lovesick as well, including Moore's sequences of drunkenness that mirror those in Arthur two years...
...Lovesick comes across as a patchwork portrayal of a mid-life crisis, and all the allusions to psychological theories serve only to distract attention from the equally unfocused action. Director-writer Marshall Brickman tried too hard, and too obviously, to keep the film constantly hilarious with devices like Freud's commentary and Benjamin's exotic fantasies. But these devices end up annoying the viewer because they don't fit smoothly into the plot...
...Lovesick, which opens on Feb. 18, Moore is a middle-aged Manhattan psychiatrist who falls in love with a nubile patient and finds happiness under the ironic eyes of Sigmund Freud's fantasy-ghost (Alec Guinness). The film was written and directed by Marshall Brickman, who collaborated with Woody Allen on the screenplays of Sleeper, Annie Hall and Manhattan, and it has many of the funny, arch touches of Allen's best pictures. The early scenes, particularly, in which a motley group of patients pass through Moore's office, are hilarious, knowing satire at its best...
...Lovesick Moore brought many touches from his own experience: he spent 17 years in the office of one shrink or another, trying to come to terms with a childhood that was more than unhappy. His father was a railway electrician, his mother was a shorthand typist, and he grew up in a poor, row-house neighborhood in the London suburb of Dagenham. But poverty was not the problem: it was a clubfoot and a skinny, slightly shorter left leg, which sent him in and out of hospitals from the age of two weeks on. "Psychologically it was made harrowing...