Deconstructing Harry Review- By Michael Carlisle

 Title: Deconstructing Harry
Year: 1997
Director: Woody Allen
Country: US
Language: English

Woody Allen's 1997 flick has been described by some critics as vulgar, smutty, profane, self-hating, self-justifying, self-involved, tasteless, bankrupt and desperate. Many wish Allen hadn't made the movie, as it's not normally the kind of project one could see the neurotic Jewish funny man making. Indeed it does have a lot of swearing and a lot of sex, but it rises far above shock value and becomes pure substance. Deconstructing Harry is Allen's most painful, and most revealing, picture to date.

Suffering from writer's block and eagerly awaiting his writing award, Harry Block,(Woody Allen) an unapologetic man who loves pills and whores, remembers events from his past and scenes from his best-selling books as characters, real and fictional, come back to haunt him.

Harry Block is no saint, he uses people and then borrows their life stories, as well as the stories about him using them for their life stories. This gets him in trouble, in one scene he is confronted by an angry woman with a gun who claims that he's a complete bastard. He is an atheistic self-hating Jew who has been through three wives, all of whom he cheated on, and six therapists. When going to his award ceremony nobody he loves will go with him, so he brings a prostitute named Cookie to accompany him. The storyline regarding a man revisiting his past while accepting an achievement is borrowed from Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries, but the character seems to have come from a deep dark place in Allen's mind. I think that Harry Block is the best developed character Allen has ever written.

Even though Harry Block is a despicable man, Allen manages us to empathize with him. Is he really that awful, or does he just not know how to cope with life? All signs point to the latter. He is a man that doesn't know how to work relationships out, but he definitely knows how to write. Perhaps Deconstructing Harry is a semi-autobiographical work, it can't be mere coincidence that this work came out the year he married Soon Yi. This relationship was heavily scrutinized by the public and media, as Allen was 36 years older than her and it was looked upon as "step-father marries step-daughter" though she was never his legal step-daughter. Allen never wanted to become a role-model, infact he struggled with the public spotlight just as Harry Block does.

Despite being a pretty bleak film, it's manages to have a lot of funny moments. In one early scene Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Richard Benjamin are having adulterous sex, while also making sure nobody from outside catches their infidelity, then a blind grandmother unexpectedly walks in the room and manages to be completely oblivious to the shagging right in front of her. One of the greatest aspects of the picture is Allen's use of a recurring jump cut in all of the reality scenes to illustrate Harry's confusion and inability to cope with life. In a scene where he is speaking with a therapist, jump cuts are used to show his interrupted thought processes. Without using words or even actions, Allen can demonstrate how chaotic and messy Block's life is.

In conclusion, Deconstructing Harry is a remarkable confession. Allen exposes himself for all to see, yet also hides himself in a veil of entertainment and comedy. The content is far from lighthearted, and ultimately improves the film. Watch for several cameos from A-list actors, including Billy Crystal as Satan and Robin Williams as a man who is literally out of focus. I should mention the script, it's the greatest script Allen has ever written. Each line of dialogue feels natural and important. Praise it! 5/5