Deconstructing Harry (1997)
Directed by Woody Allen

Film Review

Deconstructing Harry is Woody Allen's approximate self-portrait of the artist as a complete shyster, with an uncontrollable libido and a sewer-mouth to match.  Although somewhat less flamboyant, it is essentially a remake of the writer-director's earlier Stardust Memories (1980) and makes little attempt to conceal its influences in European art house cinema - principally Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957) and Federico Fellini's 8½ (1963).  Like the life of the central character it depicts and which Allen plays so brilliantly (presumably because it is the closest he has got to playing his true self on screen), this patchwork quilt of a film is a complete mess that positively revels in self-pity and self-loathing of the most sickening kind.  In the end it only just manages to come together as a grudgingly coherent statement of an artist's torment, but by this stage the spectator is unlikely to have much sympathy left for the self-destructive and grotesquely cynical protagonist, who, not content with poisoning his own life, cannot help wrecking those of the people closest to him in real life.

Allen has never created such an unsympathetic character and it's revealing that he should cast himself in the role of such an odious and carelessly destructive individual as Harry Block.  The film's depiction of a writer struggling with the severest case of writer's block is so bitterly authentic that you are left in no doubt that this is a condition the author is all too familiar with (although his superhuman productivity would tend to belie this).  Allen has probably never written or played a character as close to himself as he does here, and this is why, for all its faults (the constant stream of expletives and endless jump-cutting will strain your patience to breaking point), the film can hardly fail to hold your attention.

Amidst all the off-putting smut-encrusted crudity and frenetic silliness there some inspired comic moments along the way (the high point being Robin Williams as an actor who - to his horror - finds he is permanently out of focus), but essentially it is Allen's willingness to bare his soul and give us a privileged (albeit somewhat warped) insight into the man behind the carefully manufactured persona that makes Deconstructing Harry such an interesting work of dark introspection.  When an artist has finally attained a level of confidence (or desperation) to start disassembling his own life and art in an attempt to make sense of them, that's when he is truly justified in calling himself an artist.

Film Synopsis

Harry Block is a writer in crisis.  Afflicted with a severe case of writer's block, he is struggling to come up with an original idea for his next novel.  And if that wasn't enough to drive him to the therapist's couch his ex-wives, family and friends are now railing against him for having the audacity and bad taste to use the most intimate details of their personal lives as material in his writing.  Harry is poised on the brink of a complete nervous breakdown and as his life falls apart his fictional creations return to him to console and taunt him, whilst their real-life counterparts become increasingly fractious and threatening.  Things come to a head when Harry abducts his own son whilst driving to his old university to receive an award, accompanied by a man with a heart condition and a sympathetic prostitute.  His descent into Hell is now firmly assured...