Woody Allen's films have been an acquired taste for a while now and it's always tempting to think this has something to do with the man himself. Deconstructing Harry makes the argument that both man and films have become too hard to take. Everybody knows Allen's personal problems; given some of the obsessions of this film, a viewer might well wonder, Why bother? If you do bother, though, you get a surprisingly tough-minded analysis of the off-the-shelf Woody Allen character.
Harry Block is a successful novelist in the literary sense of the word (i.e., he doesn't write romance novels like Jack Nicholson's Melvin Udall in As Good as It Gets). He's a cruddy person all the way through, whose success comes from rewriting his life as "thinly disguised" fiction. What a life. Harry has three ex-wives, an alienated half-sister, a long, long string of hookers and an obsession with oral sex. Harry Block is the most needy, manipulative, selfish bastard in the whole world. He's as nutty as Melvin Udall, but Melvin's obsessive-compulsion is downright cuddly next to Harry's less specific disorder. At least Melvin insults people in new and original ways; Harry just whines and wheedles and nags and never understands for a second what it must be like to be anyone but Harry Block. You get sick of him very fast, and that's the point.
Harry is the end of the line for the classic Woody Allen neurotic Jewish intellectual. They've all been self-obsessed creeps who date women half their age, but luckily, they've all had moorings--a job or a supportive family or something. Harry has nothing but his work (and the writing life is not the same thing as a job) and unfortunately his work consists mostly of sitting in a room by himself making up stuff. When you look at it this way, the world really does revolve around Harry.
The movie has a lot of actors because many of the characters appear twice, once as fiction, once as reality. This is a gimmick that works, in that it shows how Harry's mind functions. Far from a distraction, the intercuts between fiction and real life are good story telling and necessary for setting up the ending. The technique is disorienting at times, but then it's probably disorienting just being Harry Block.
There is a plot to all this, involving an award that Harry receives from the upstate college which expelled him years earlier, and which he attends with an acquaintance, a hooker and his young son, whom he kidnaps (thinking, How can it be kidnapping when it's your own son). It all turns out badly of course. Jack Nicholson found redemption at the end in a the arms of a woman half his age. Harry Block winds up in a solipsistic nightmare, which is about where he belongs.
Deconstructing Harry is raw and vicious; there's even a little gun play. The sordid sexuality and the language really make this an atypical Woody Allen film. There are words here that you seldom hear in a movie, even these days, and it wouldn't be surprising if Deconstructing Harry flirted with an NC-17.
It's a tough movie to take, because of it's uncompromising and relentless approach to its subject. It lost the critics, perhaps unfairly. Look at it this way--everyone knows the standard rap on the stock Woody Allen character. Woody Allen is just jumping in with the newest and harshest rap of all.
-- Kevin Welch kwelch@mailbag.com
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