There is a particular kind of artist who can turn his own neuroses into a career. Woody Allen has been doing it for decades, but with Deconstructing Harry, he takes the idea almost literally. The film’s central character, Harry Block (Allen), is a writer who has spent his life turning the people around him into material, and now finds himself surrounded by people who recognize themselves in his fiction. That premise gives Allen an unusually sharp target: himself.
Buy Deconstructing HarryHarry is not simply a fictionalized Woody Allen. He is a deliberately exaggerated version of the artist who believes that his work excuses his behavior. He is selfish, dishonest, sexually reckless, emotionally evasive, and often downright unpleasant. Yet he is also talented, funny, and painfully aware of the contradictions inside him. Allen does not ask us to forgive Harry because he is an artist. Instead, he keeps asking how much cruelty an artist can transform into art before the transformation itself becomes another form of cruelty.
Harry’s philosophy toward sex is summed up with characteristic bluntness: “Sex without love is an empty experience, but as empty experiences go, it’s one of the best.” It’s funny, but it also tells us almost everything we need to know about him. Harry has an answer for everything, and his answers tend to turn selfishness into wisdom. He can acknowledge his flaws without necessarily feeling obligated to change them.
Harry’s real life constantly collides with scenes from his books, with actors playing fictional versions of people he knows. Reality and fiction bleed into one another until the distinction becomes almost meaningless. It is a funny device, but there is something unsettling underneath it. Harry has spent so much time converting his life into stories that he seems incapable of experiencing other people without turning them into characters.
And yet, Deconstructing Harry is very funny. Allen has rarely been interested in making his protagonists particularly admirable, but Harry’s spectacular lack of self-awareness gives the comedy an especially interesting edge. The movie has the rhythm of a stand-up routine that has wandered into a family-therapy session and refuses to leave. Even the title is a joke with teeth: Harry is being “deconstructed,” but he is also deconstructing himself, taking apart his own life and everyone else’s and stuffing the pieces into his fiction.
The film also contains one of Allen’s most effective ideas about writing. Harry’s characters sometimes appear more emotionally alive than the people who supposedly inspired them. His fiction can express truths that Harry himself is unable to confront directly. That does not make him a good person, but it does make him an interesting artist. The uncomfortable possibility is that his talent and his moral failings are inseparable. His willingness to exploit his own life, and the lives of others, may be precisely what allows him to write with such brutal honesty.
There is also a wonderfully dark joke buried in Harry’s attitude toward suffering. “The most beautiful words in the English language are not ‘I love you’ but ‘It’s benign.'” The line is funny because it is so perfectly self-centered and neurotic, but it also fits the movie’s larger preoccupation with mortality. Harry is terrified of death, terrified of meaninglessness, and apparently determined to cope with both by making jokes.
The result is one of Allen’s strangest comedies, and one of his most revealing. Deconstructing Harry isn’t really an apology, a confession, or even a self-defense. It is closer to an artist putting himself on the witness stand and then writing all of the testimony himself. Harry Block wants to believe that everything can be turned into art. The movie’s final joke is that perhaps he is right. The harder question is whether that makes him brilliant, terrible, or both.
