Sean Burns
Woody Allen knows exactly what you think of him. Released near the tail end of the most tumultuous decade in the filmmaker’s nearly 60-year career, 1997’s Deconstructing Harry is impossible not to read as a reaction to the famously private and press-shy director finding his personal life splashed all over the front pages, after he got caught cheating on longtime girlfriend Mia Farrow with her 21-year-old, adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. Overnight, the arthouse darling became a tabloid pariah, and he wasn’t happy about it. Allen’s career quickly rebounded, with 1994’s Bullets Over Broadway and 1995’s Mighty Aphrodite winning Oscars for supporting actresses Dianne Weist and Mira Sorvino. But if all was forgiven in Hollywood, it wasn’t by Woody.
Deconstructing Harry is still shocking; a monstrously funny middle finger of a movie that serves as a splenetic lean-in to pretty much all of the personal and professional criticisms Allen has faced throughout his career. Upending his screen persona as the charming, principled nebbish, the filmmaker cast himself as a self-destructive, pill-popping, alcoholic pervert with a filthy mouth – part of the film’s unsavory kick is hearing him say things you never thought you’d hear in a Woody Allen movie – who not infrequently describes himself as “the worst person in the world.” (That was actually the film’s original title, and I swear the distributors cost themselves millions by not running with the ad campaign: “Woody Allen is The Worst Person in the World.”)
We first see Harry Block being chased across a rooftop with a pistol by a jilted lover (Judy Davis) to whose sister (Amy Irving) he was briefly and unhappily married. Harry recently ditched them both for a 25-year-old grad student (Elisabeth Shue) and wrote about all the dirty details in one of his thinly-disguised tell-all novels that have made him one of the most acclaimed authors of his generation. (He’s basically supposed to be Philip Roth without being Philip Roth.) We witness dramatizations of Harry’s books and short stories throughout the film – often absurdist vignettes done in the blackout sketch style of Allen’s early comedies.
Deconstructing Harry opens with a doozy, in which he and the Davis character’s fictionalized stand-ins, played by Richard Benjamin and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, sneak off for a tryst during a family barbecue. After her unsuccessful attempt at orally servicing him (“Try not to chew,” he suggests) the two end up doing it doggy-style, upright in front of a picture window when her blind mother walks in and obliviously misinterprets their grunts of pleasure as conversational responses. I still fondly recall gasps from genteel arthouse patrons in a New York City movie theater on opening night. Jaws hit the floor even harder a few minutes later, when Allen calls Davis “a world-class meshuggener c*nt.”
Susan E. Morse’s frenetic editing and Carlo Di Palma’s herky-jerky handheld cinematography suggest a movie in the midst of a panic attack, doubling down on the jump-cuts, seasick camera and harsh language of Husbands and Wives, Allen’s anxious 1992 masterpiece of collapsing marriages that uncomfortably overlapped with the Soon-Yi scandal. The film only chills out formally when we see the excerpts from Harry’s books and short stories, some of which could stand alone as classic short films of their own.
The most telling stars Robin Williams as an actor who wakes up one day to find himself out of focus. Not mentally. He’s literally blurry. Friends and family are forced to wear adaptive glasses in order to look at him without getting headaches, and it’s no accident that they’re the thick, black-rimmed style of Allen’s trademark specs. (It’s also terribly amusing that Williams, the biggest movie star in the cast, never once appears in focus.) As the author’s therapist explains, the glasses are Harry’s expectation that the world around him will adjust to the distortion he’s become. The movie comes with a lot of handy explainers like that, trying to deconstruct the mess that is Harry.
Borrowing the premise of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, Harry’s on his way to be honored at his old alma mater – a road trip prompting flashbacks, visits to estranged relatives and other journeys through the past, seamlessly integrated with the star-studded re-enactments of Harry’s roman a clefs. (If you think Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a clever stand-in for Judy Davis, wait until you see Demi Moore playing Kirstie Alley, the latter distinguishing herself with one of the most deliciously vituperative utterances of the word “motherfucker” in modern film.) Having alienated pretty much everyone else in his personal life, Harry hires a hooker named Cookie to accompany him on the trip. Played by Hazelle Goodman in pink plastic hot pants and a crop top, she’s the sanest person in the picture.
Reality, fantasy and Harry’s drug-induced hallucinations become so intertwined that the writer eventually finds himself banished to the fiery pits of Hell – alongside “book critics, serial killers and lawyers who appear on television” — and squares off against Satan himself, played with sublime smarm by Billy Crystal. Both men drink tequila and boast about chicks they’ve banged while Harry argues that he’s actually worse than the devil. After all, Satan’s a fallen angel, but Harry never believed in anything to begin with. The sequence contains perhaps the most stupidly brilliant one-liner in Allen’s entire filmography, about a dyslexic girl who put Tampax in her nose.
It’s an epic heel turn. Allen was trolling audiences decades before anyone thought to call it that. (See also: Stardust Memories.) Long criticized for a lack of African-American representation in his films, that his first Black character would be a drug-smoking sex worker named Cookie is a bit of a taunt, and a complicated one since Goodman gives one of the most appealing performances in the movie. Shue’s casting continues the then-62-year-old auteur’s unseemly tendency to pair himself with improbably young and beautiful love interests like Sorvino, Helena Bonham Carter, and Julia Roberts. He leans hard into this as well, with Mariel Hemingway – best remembered for playing his angelic, 17-year-old girlfriend in 1979’s Manhattan — here appearing as a frowny-faced, middle-aged housefrau so horrified by Harry she melts down screaming at him in the street. But not before he calls her an “aggressive, tight-assed, busybody c*nt.”
It’s a nasty picture, but in a way that feels liberating and fresh. Shaking off any semblance of decorum or need to be liked by the audience, the movie is unapologetic, even exhilarating in its rottenness. You feel like you’re getting away with something while you’re watching it. Allen originally offered the part of Harry to Elliott Gould, Dustin Hoffman, Dennis Hopper and Albert Brooks before Brooks finally told him he’d be crazy not to play it himself. He’s not particularly believable as a booze-swilling pussyhound, and Gould certainly would have better sold the character’s connection to Philip Roth’s brand of intensely sexualized, self-loathing Judaism. But there’s something thrilling about seeing the uptight Woody character we’ve been watching for three decades suddenly cut loose as a complete degenerate.
Deconstructing Harry was Allen’s second-to-last collaboration with editor Morse, who had been cutting his movies since Manhattan, and his last of 12 pictures with cinematographer Di Palma; the end of an era. Though a few of his later films have had their moments, saying he’s lost a step or two over the years would be exceedingly generous. Never again would Allen attempt the restless invention or formal experimentation that made the first 30 years of his career so thrilling. The movies became more like a habit, both for the auteur and his audience.
So perhaps it’s fitting then that we leave our protagonist not in Hell, but rather a purgatory of his own creation. The only folks who can stand to be around him anymore are the characters from his books. He’s honored and accepted at last, by people who exist only in his imagination. Presumably because of rights issues, Deconstructing Harry was a difficult movie to see over these past few years. That the film is currently streaming on Amazon — the same studio that made a dubious and undoubtedly expensive display of virtue out of refusing to release Allen’s A Rainy Day in New York back in 2018 (psst, it’s on there now, too) — is an irony that would be greatly appreciated by Harry Block.
“Deconstructing Harry” is streaming on Amazon Prime, Peacock, Tubi, and Plex.
