Aside from Zelig and Radio Days, I had never seen a Woody Allen film until this week. (I know that sounds impossible considering he makes about fifty movies a decade, but it's nonetheless true.) I understand that Woody's films fall under a few different categories, and perhaps I should have a firmer grasp of a few more examples of his style, but I'm going to write this review anyway. I'm also going to challenge the prospective viewer of Deconstructing Harry to try and find a single line of dialogue in the film that does not (1) include the words "I" or "me," and (2) include a pronoun referring to Woody Allen's character, such as "he" or "you." Was the Seventies called "the Me Decade" because that was when Woody Allen's career really took off? Perhaps not... but it's a bit of a coincidence.

That first paragraph makes it sound like I hated Deconstructing Harry... but that isn't the case. I really enjoyed the film, and will seek out more of his work in the near future. (A Blockbuster rental copy of Mighty Aphrodite is currently taking up space on my desk, just waiting for a playback.) The continually self-referential style is something that takes some getting used to for the uninitiated newcomer. I will poke fun at it, but in actuality I respect this filmmaker's ability to scoop out pieces of his soul (especially the unlikable ones) and fling them onto the screen, seemingly at random.

In Deconstructing Harry, Woody Allen gives us a portrait of a man (played by himself, of course) who is suffering from acute writer's block following the publication of his most recent novel. We don't meet him at first, though; first we're treated to a portion of one of his stories, in which two people having an affair (played by a smirking Richard Benjamin and a seemingly unsettled Julia-Louis Dreyfus) are "caught" by a blind woman while in the act of intercourse. We soon discover that this scenario happened to Harry... or Woody... or whoever, in almost exactly the same way, as his former lover storms into his apartment and berates him (and us) with ten or fifteen minutes of breathless over-the-top anger. (I don't remember who played this lover now; I should, but as you will see Harry has so many ex-wives and -lovers that it becomes difficult to keep track.) In this scene, and basically any other in which we actually see Harry, the shots are jarringly edited, purposely deleting bits of dialogue and walks back and forth across the floor. I assume the desired effect is to depict the main character's psychological instability, or perhaps his perspective of seeing life as an endless series of short scenes rather than a sensible flow of events. Once I got used to this overall pattern, it became quite interesting to see where the narrative (or the lack thereof) would go next.

The film intersperses these scenes of Harry interacting with people in his present life, with flashback scenes of Harry at various moments in his past - and all of these are in turn interspersed with bits of stories he's written and fictional characters he's created, all based in some way on his own life. These sequences are often interesting, though occasionally a bit tedious. The one featuring Robin Williams as an actor who has literally gone "out of focus" is clever but a bit hard on the eyes. A shortly-before-Pleasantville Tobey Maguire plays a young man who is absolutely obsessed with sex. Demi Moore does a competent job as a fictional composite who becomes "Jewish with a vengeance" shortly after marriage. And just when you're getting used to the concept of fiction existing side-by-side with reality, Woody throws you a hard-hitting curve ball by allowing the two to merge - we begin to see Harry in conversations with his own fictional characters, who are infinitely more insightful than Harry himself.

As for the "real" people in Harry's life, they appear to have their own lives, but in many cases we get little insight into them apart from Harry himself. Kirstie Alley shows up as a psychologist who has just found out Harry is seeing someone else - here she plays the loudest, most verbally offensive version of Rebecca Howe from Cheers that you could imagine. Elisabeth Shue appears in the film mostly to look gorgeous and alternately tell Harry she loves his novels and turn her back on him for his best friend, played by an uncomfortable-looking Billy Crystal. There is also a prostitute-turned-friend(?) named Cookie, and it is still not clear to me whether she genuinely enjoys Harry's company or she's just there because he's paying her to accompany him on a road trip to a special day at a college in honor of him as a novelist. And that's just for openers.

The remainder of the film pretty much redeems it in my opinion. While the central character remains neurotic and unredeemable, justifying affairs and trysts with hookers and indifference toward people in his life by overexplaining his own thoughts and feelings, it becomes clear that the only easy answer for him is to fully immerse himself into his own imagination. This is taken to its logical extreme in the final scene, which (for me) was easily the best in the film - although I kind of liked the sequence set in Hell also. This movie was sometimes uncomfortable to watch, jumping as it did from one point in time to another, leaping from "reality" to fiction... but all this helped rather than detracted from the film's subject. I also like the bouncy jazzy tune that opens and closes the film. Definitely one to see.



Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age