Deconstructing Harry

Starring:Caroline Aaron, Kirstie Alley, Bob Balaban, Richard Benjamin, Eric Bogosian, Billy Crystal, Judy Davis, Dan Frazer, Mariel Hemingway, Amy Irving, Julie Kavner, Eric Lloyd, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tobey Maguire, Demi Moore, Stephanie Roth Haberle, Elisabeth Shue, Stanley Tucci, Robin Williams
Studio: New Line Home Video
Product Type: DVD

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Woody Allen roared back at his detractors with Deconstructing Harry, a bitterly funny treatise about the creative process. Known to mine his often tumultuous personal life for his movies, the embattled writer-director-star didn't bother to make his alter ego likable in this movie: Harry Block (Allen) pops pills, frequents prostitutes, and cheats on the women in his life, then writes about their foibles in thinly disguised fiction. No wonder they're all furious with him. As Harry journeys to his alma mater with a hooker, ill pal, and kidnapped son, a series of flashbacks unravel, juxtaposing Harry's relationships with their "slightly exaggerated" fictional counterparts. There are amusing cameos throughout, including a humorous turn by Demi Moore as a fictitious ex-wife who "became Jewish with a vengeance," and Billy Crystal as the devil who found Hollywood too nasty for his liking. The humor is dark and caustic, but well worth it; Deconstructing Harry is a near-brilliant mediation on the sometimes queasy relationship between art, creator, and critic. --Diane Garrett

Customer Reviews:

"...if I tell you why I did it, will you promise not to NUDGE me ? ".......2007-05-18

10 years --- still shock & awe funny. Very smart, but just not dubbable for basic cable or broadcast-cuttable for the commissars of the ridiculous FCC. (it kind of makes American Pie 2 look like a chick-flick) The central character, Woody Allen himself, is filled with misanthropic hatreds, addictions and cowardice, but wants to appeal to our empathy, not our apathy. He announces at one point while visiting his sister's pious, well-meaning household: "...they are ALL your people!..."

Nihilism, cynicism, sarcasm, orgasm.......2007-04-28

In his prose writing, Allen superbly skewers the neuroses, ambitions and dysfunctions of major writers - 'and then Hemingway put on boxing gloves and broke my nose'. In Deconstructing Harry, Allen plays Harry Block - an alcoholic, neurotic, cowardly, pill poping, sexually deviant writer, on the back of three failed marriages, who incurs the wrath of his family and friends by using thinly veiled portraits them in his fiction.

This is a case of art imitating life. Allen's own life is similarly contorted and complex, and it is common in America for its greatest novelists to have readers buzzing like private spies around their works trying to extract what is real and what is made up. Philip Roth in particular has mined rich fiction out of such workings. Allen, in similarly intellectual, self reflexive style gives us a fascinating movie where Harry Block is confronted by ex wifes and family members who despise his selfishness, his lack of human sympathy. This leads to some great dialogue. Try this for a classic Allen line when he goes to visit his sister Doris, who has reverted to traditional Judaism:

Doris - 'You have no values, your whole life, it's nihilism, cynicism, sarcasm and orgasm.'
Harry: 'Y'know, in France I could run on that slogan and win.'

Brilliant.

The movie is clever, but not without flaws. As with other Allen films, the female characters are not well developed. The whole movie is about Harry. Women are portrayed as one dimensional, intellectually subservient beings who fall in love with the great artist and have no other recourse other than to become hysterical when it all goes wrong. Harry sleeps with a lively black prostitute and persuades her to come with him the next day on his trip to his old college to be honoured. The whore is potentially a great character, but she doesn't really have a role to play once the trip is underway, she just hangs around in pink leather hotpants making the odd comment in reaction to Allen's neuroses, basically just a character to highlight another of Harry's flaws - the great artist trawling around with whores stereotype.

Also the film is terribly edited - scenes jerking awkwardly into others. Perhaps this was due to a huge cast of high profile actors so a tight shooting schedule entailed insufficient time for quality filming. Not a big negative, but a shame nonetheless.

All in all, an entertaining, funny portrait of the artist as flawed man.

The Dark Side.......2007-01-05

This is one of Allen's darker films and immediately any Allen fan can tell because of how raw it is... Allen's films are usually devoid of foul language but this one seems to be cowritten by Quentin Tarantino. Needless to say, this may be the perfect movie for any person who has enjoyed a Woody Allen film but who has said that all of his movies are the same. The plot is clever, a writer makes enemies with everyone he knows because his books are a little too close to fact. As dark as this film is, I must say that it still is hilarious. Another brilliant Woody Allen flick...

Great Fun!.......2006-11-10

Woody Allen, as always, a genius that desnudes the humans soul. He tells the miseries and the greats of common people in an ironic but funny way, that we can only laugh of our misbehaviours. Freud would love it!

Harry Block Lives in a Fellini Movie.......2006-09-19

An homage to Fellini with dream sequences in which Harry Block's fictional characters from his short stories interwine with his real-life characters, Deconstructing Harry is about a writer who cannibalizes his life experience, using his loved ones and family as fodder for his fiction and who in the process alienates, humiliates, and enrages those people who prefer their secrets not be featured in published fiction. Amongst this turmoil the writer Harry is obsessed with freeing himself from himself--a sixty-year-old man who never grows up but who remains fixated on his childish ego, his raging lusts, and his incurable narcissism. Divorced several times, barely able to see his young son, and resenting that a lover whom he scorned is now marrying, he must negotiate between the people he has alienated and the fictional characters who merge with reality as he goes on a soul quest to answer the question: Can I ever grow up? I can't reveal the ending but will say that the film maintains a Fellinisque, comic tone that has a hint of magic. The film does an excellent job of showing Harry's real-life adventures and weaving them with dramatizations of his stories that parallel his condition.