One of Woody Allen’s sharper late-career efforts. Deconstructing Harry isn’t really a conventional story so much as it’s a collage of memory, fiction, and self-loathing. Call it a neurotic fever chart. Allen plays Harry Block, a novelist who has spent years raiding his own life for material. Ex-wives, sisters, old flames—they’ve all turned up in his work, thinly disguised. Of course, they despise him for it.
This is a movie that keeps breaking apart and then reassembling itself. Reality, memory, and fiction (usually manifested as characters who storm out of excerpts from his own stories) overlap to such a degree that you can’t always tell which is which. At one point, Harry is lying on his therapist’s couch, and the scene suddenly flickers into one of his stories, where Tobey Maguire is playing Harry on that same couch. Robin Williams turns up as an actor who’s literally “out of focus”—a gag that works as a kind of existential slapstick but also as a wry comment on identity and alienation.
This is a unique movie with spikes of guilt, lust, and anger—all of which are jumbled into fragments that Harry can’t control. Hallucinations, dreams, and arguments pile up in blurs of creative panic and personal fallout. The effect is jagged and often exhausting, but Woody Allen’s sour timing and aphoristic one-liners maintain a kind of buoyancy from scene to scene.
For viewers who might not already be tuned to Allen’s wavelength, this film will look self-indulgent. Well, most of his films feel self-indulgent, but this one more so than most. For fans, though, Deconstructing Harry plays like his ultimate artistic exorcism. A farcical confessional that’s honest enough to sting but also remains absurdly and deliriously fizzy.