What About Bob?

A superneurotic (Bill Murray) becomes the patient of a vain, up-and-coming psychoanalyst and author (Richard Dreyfuss) about to leave on his summer vacation; he pursues the doctor to his New England summer house, befriends his family, and ultimately drives him mad. Basically a high-concept comedy, scripted by Tom Schulman from a story by Alvin Sargent and producer Laura Ziskin and directed by Frank Oz (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels), this cruel but effective black comedy violates credibility at almost every turn, but the concept itself is so strongparticularly as a revenge fantasy for anyone who’s ever resented hypocritical exploitative shrinksthat it winds up working pretty well anyway. A key factor in this is Dreyfuss’s finely tuned tight-ass performance, one of the strongest expressions of repressed domestic frustration since the salad days of W.C. Fields. (Murray, by contrast, is relatively hamstrung by inadequate scripting.) With Julie Hagerty, Charlie Korsmo, and Kathryn Erbe. (JR)

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