In interviews, Allen has very vocally attempted to separate the character of Harry from himself, pointing out his efforts to cast other actors in the role. He needn't have bothered--he is Harry, the same way he was Alvy Singer in Annie Hall or the depressed filmmaker in Stardust Memories, this film's most obvious forebear. Some of Allen's films have been patently autobiographical, others sheerly fictional, but in almost all of them Allen has played essentially the same part, that of a nice guy and perennial victim. In Deconstructing Harry, Allen liberates himself from the pity trap--the factor that has for some time now made his own performances the weakest element of his films. In his acting, Allen has always been a victimized vegetarian in the social food chain; with this film, he turns voracious carnivore, sinking his teeth into the role of a scoundrel with a sharpness of attack absent in his work for many years.
Allen's biography tells us that the lovable schnook this tough, wiry man inhabited and rode to fame 30 years ago was the deliberate concoction of an ambitious introvert who coolly assessed what lines got the most laughs in his stand-up act. Coming from a short, bespectacled man, lines such as, "I was beaten up by Quakers" got the big laughs. While quite hilariously funny in his best films of the 1970s, Allen's limited range became more and more outdated in the 1980s. It was probably last used effectively in Crimes and Misdemeanors back in 1989; in the 1990s, the act became embarrassing. In the recent Everyone Says I Love You, for example, Allen was quite unbelievable romancing Julia Roberts, looking, as a friend of mine put it, like her elderly Uncle Max.
With Harry Block, Allen the actor is reborn at age 62, blending in familiar pieces of his persona to this new, blunt, unpleasant character. Harry's quirks--his distaste for the country, or contempt for drugs--are boilerplate Allen; the film's many references to its creator's recent career in the tabloids will be obvious to all. What's new in the film is the directness with which Harry speaks about his sexual desires and other issues as well--most notably his Jewish identity, a topic that aside from quips Allen has pretty much left alone for most of his career. One of the best scenes in the new film is Harry's argument with his sister and Zionist brother-in-law (played by Caroline Aaron and Eric Bogosian) over the nature of Judaism. Allen dares an angry joke about the Holocaust and gets away with it, an audacity both Allen the actor and Allen the filmmaker sustain through most of the picture.
Deconstructing Harry is full of surprises, right from its opening frames. Around the time of the breakup with Mia Farrow, Allen almost involuntarily resorted to an unpleasant shaky-cam look (Husbands and Wives), perhaps as a manifestation of the vertigo we can guess Allen felt at the time. Other than that, the look and feel of Allen's films have stayed on a fairly even keel for two decades now. Viewers know the drill: plain titles on black background, jazz standards on the soundtrack, amber-hued cinematography, big names in small parts.
From its opening images, Deconstructing Harry plays with these conventions. Allen breaks up the titles with flash cuts of an enraged Lucy (Judy Davis, playing one of Harry's discarded lovers) arriving at Harry's door. Jump cuts interrupt the action throughout the film, continuously propelling the action forward. Many scenes in Deconstructing Harry are dark echoes of nicer scenes in Allen's nicer movies. In one scene, an outdoor-loathing TV-sports fan is revealed to be not Allen but Richard Benjamin--who in turn is revealed to be Allen's fictional alter ego. For once Allen's eclectic, star-driven casting makes sense; stars such as Robin Williams and Demi Moore play creatures of Harry's imagination rather than serve as distracting cameos, as with the pointless use of Jodie Foster and Madonna in Shadows and Fog.
The many illustrated fantasies in Deconstructing Harry are some of the film's most appealing elements. Allen reveals himself once more as one of the cinema's most creative imaginations as he brings to the screen the whimsies prowling through Harry's mind. If Allen is not Jean Cocteau, Jacques Tourneur, or David Lynch--that is, able to create fantastic worlds through pure imagery--he is able, like peers such as Jeunet & Caro or Michael Powell, to find good ways to illustrate his clever ideas on film. Harry's trip to hell, with Allen wisecracking his way through a lurid papier-mache landscape out of Bosch or Dante, is a good example, and one of the highlights of the film. To a greater filmmaker, Harry's selfishness might have been shown as hell for others, but that is not Allen. To an introvert like Harry--to an introvert like Allen--hell, as Sartre would say, is other people.
This is the bad side of Allen's existential freedom: the dizzying willingness to play at wickedness that so enlivens this movie. Yes, the devil always gets the best lines, but here Harry gets to outtalk the devil himself. Allen the filmmaker is still not completely able to resist the temptation to have Allen the character one-up others less clever than he. No one ever is. This--along with Deconstructing Harry's uncertain overlap with the real Woody Allen's life--reminds me of the late works of one of Allen's heroes, Charles Chaplin. In Monsieur Verdoux, Chaplin plays a wife killer who gets away with it (almost)--a coldly brilliant illustration of the filmmaker's core misogyny. In Deconstructing Harry, Allen plays an all-around heel who gets away with everything and always will.
One hopes that Harry is purely the product of Allen's imagination. (There are ways--as in what his critics call "Jewish self-hatred," the overt sexuality in his writing, and in his recent highly public breakup with Claire Bloom--that Philip Roth seems a more obvious model for Harry Block than Allen himself.) It's an imagination that has, however, opted out of the social world that the rest of us inhabit; like Harry, Woody Allen has written his own social contract and made us like it.
I'm not at all concerned here with Allen's private sins, if any. Rather, I'm struck by his chilly isolation from the rest of the world, the blinkered view of our shared community revealed in film after film. After years of ignoring the black community Allen finally gives a large part to an African-American in this movie--she plays a whore. Everyone else, as always in Allen's films, is rich, privileged, and white as a snail's belly. As a social being, Harry sins not in hiring prostitutes but by treating them as rented meat; not in cheating on his lovers but in humiliating them before the community in print. I'm not sure that Allen thinks this way, but the filmmaker gives us no sense that he recognizes that Block is a scoundrel in those ways as well as the more obvious and colorful ones. It's not apparent from Deconstructing Harry that Allen, isolated genius millionaire celebrity that he is, ever will.
Deconstructing Harry.
Directed and written by Woody Allen. Starring Allen, Judy Davis, Billy Crystal, and Elisabeth Shue. Opens Thursday.
