Deconstructing Harry
Jean Doumanian Productions, 1997, Rated MA
Review by Daniel Batt
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 60
Autumn 1998

I remember sitting in a review screening of Woody Allen's film Husbands and Wives just after stories of his affair with Mia Farrow's adopted daughter, Soon-Yi, were dribbling out. The scenes of Allen's affair with a Lolita-esque Juliette Lewis brought awkward grimaces and sniggers where once it would have produced hilarity. Art was imitating life was imitating art; one couldn't help wondering what Farrow would have felt, if she could bring herself to watch the film. Had the inner adolescent given a free (though one thought metaphorical) role in Allen's films gone feral? Had one of those priapic schlemiels done the reverse of the Purple Rose of Cairo and stepped disastrously out of art into Farrow's life?

Given the metaphysical seriousness of Allen's films, theorists sought deeper meanings in his sexual obsessions. The Catholic film theorist Andrew Greeley saw his romantic infatuation with women as a sacrament of grace. Romance redeemed what seemed an otherwise pointless life and somehow still pointed to something more. The youth of the women symbolised new life, new beginnings.

Allen's character in Zelig says, "Already, all right, you've got her. Isn't that enough for now? Maybe she's a hint of something else. So you want more hints? What can I tell you? Isn't she a good enough hint?" Greeley observed that this sacramental or romantic theology would not have been something unfamiliar to Pascal or Dante. In fact, Greeley even said: "Who else besides, Woody Allen makes films that honestly and unambiguously ask about the existence of God and the purpose of life and suggest tentative answers that are acceptably Catholic?" Greely wrote this in 1988, and of course events since then lead us to wonder whether rumours of Allen's conversion were greatly exaggerated. Yet Greely's hope that Allen was a closet Catholic is illustrative of the filmmaker's ability to make profoundly self-referential (self-obsessed?) films which suggested a profound vulnerability or self-revelation¾albeit with that peculiarly self-deprecating New York Jewish humour.

All these notions of the 'self' are hard to avoid in talking of Allen's films. And yet his latest, Deconstructing Harry, seeks to satirise our obsession with the real and the celluloid Woody. Deconstructing Harry is a very '90s version of Bergmann's Wild Strawberries, the story of an ageing professor who revisits his life in the lead up to a return to his alma mater to be honoured. Allen plays Harry Block, also an ageing writer who can find no one to accompany him to an honouring ceremony at the college that, in his youth, he was kicked out of (for getting caught giving the Dean's wife an enema).
Block has lost most of his friends, either through sexual misadventure or caricaturing them in his novels. The films starts with his former sister in law (Judy Davis) turning up at his apartment with a gun, because their affair years before was too thinly veiled in his latest book. "Your latest magnum opus emerges from this sewer of an apartment", she says. "You take people's misery and turn it into literary gold."

Block exists in a world of hazy, drugged self-loathing. He is endlessly popping pills, blacking out and telling people, "I'm spiritually bankrupt; I'm empty." In fact, the film cuts to his past and its allusions in his writing smoothly, yet cuts very awkwardly (between and within) scenes in the present. It depicts someone more at home in the past and in his writing than in a fragmented present of regret and numbing drugs. Allen uses much more tortured, sexually obsessed language and ideas than in previous films. His creed, says his sister, is "nihilism, cynicism, sarcasm and orgasm". Blocks replies with a ubiquitous one-liner: "You know, in France I could run on that ticket and win."

Deconstructing Harry is both hilarious and caustically tragic. Allen anticipates his fans surmising that this might be the natural end of a man who seduces his partner's adopted daughter and loses most of his friends¾it's so tragic and bizarre that a cynical humour seems almost appropriate. Yet Allen's alter ego, Harry Block, is impenetrably elusive, "six shrinks later, three wives down the line" he is in part a metaphor for unwise idolatry. The theologian and the detached, liberal educated Upper East-Sider who thought they had a soul mate were both fooled. Allen seems to be saying that how we view the relationship between this existential bower bird and his art says more about us than him.

Deconstructing Harry doesn't end with any intimations of romantic hope. In Mighty Aphrodite, Allen used Mira Sorvino's prostitute as a character in need of his benevolent, though paternalistic, redemption. However, in the current film Harry Block sleeps with prostitutes only for the sex, without even a polite chat beforehand. Block prefers prostitutes because "you don't have to discuss Proust or films". The film ends with characters from Block's novels accepting him as no one else can. They, of course, understand that he is "a guy who can't function in life; only in art". They tell him that it is his gifts that make him worthy of love.

It might not be going too far to see this as a broadside at a fragmenting community of once fiercely loyal fans. 'You're disillusioned? Your illusions, your idolatry, was the problem. I always said I was screwed up. It was my art, not me, that you admired.' Allen seems to be saying this as well as trying to deconstruct any trustworthy relationship between the artist and his art. If this sounds a bit fragmented, well, no surprises. Deconstructing Harry is the antithesis to the former themes of young women as tentative sacraments of grace. Those urbane Lolita obsessions have become dark, unfulfilling, misogynistic addictions. Allen's sense of significance now rests on the admiration of his fans. If we were to take the Cynics' Word Book author Ambrose Bierce's definition of admiration, as "the polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves", the new celulliod Woody's significance rests on pretty shaky ground.

Daniel Batt is a editor of Zadok Perspectives.E-mail: editor@zadok.org.au