Deconstructing Harry (1997)
Film Overview
A successful novelist suffering from writer’s block prepares to return to the university that once expelled him, while the people, marriages and betrayals he has transformed into fiction begin catching up with him.
Woody Allen plays Harry Block, a celebrated writer whose professional success has been built partly on turning the most intimate details of his life into stories. His former wives, lovers, relatives and friends frequently recognise themselves in the books and are rarely pleased by what they find there.
As Harry prepares to travel to his old university to receive an honour, the film moves freely between his present life, memories and scenes from his fiction. Actors repeatedly appear as characters inspired by people Harry knows, blurring the boundary between the writer’s life and the stories he has extracted from it.
Judy Davis plays Lucy, one of Harry’s furious former lovers, Kirstie Alley is his psychoanalyst ex-wife Joan, Elisabeth Shue plays Fay, and Hazelle Goodman appears as Cookie, the prostitute Harry recruits to accompany him on his increasingly disastrous journey.
Robin Williams appears in one of Harry’s stories as an actor who literally goes out of focus, while Billy Crystal plays both Larry and, later, the Devil in a comic descent into Hell. The large ensemble also includes Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Demi Moore, Tobey Maguire, Mariel Hemingway, Stanley Tucci, Bob Balaban and Amy Irving.
Carlo Di Palma photographs the film in colour, but its visual language is deliberately fractured: jump cuts, abrupt edits and repeated temporal shifts give the film the unstable rhythm of a writer trying to reconstruct his own life from pieces.
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My Review
The writer who has used everybody up
Deconstructing Harry is one of Woody Allen’s most abrasive films, but also one of his most inventive. It takes the familiar idea of the artist drawing on real life and asks what happens when the people providing the material decide they have had enough.
Harry Block has achieved the thing many writers spend their lives wanting: readers, money, critical respect and the freedom to keep writing. The difficulty is that almost every success has been purchased with somebody else’s privacy. Harry takes affairs, marriages, arguments, sexual encounters and family humiliations and turns them into fiction with very little concern for how recognisable the source material might be.
He believes the transformation into art gives him permission. The people around him disagree. Lucy arrives furious because Harry has used the details of their affair. Joan has equally good reasons to despise him. Other relationships have collapsed under the weight of his selfishness, addictions and inability to treat another person’s life as something other than future material.
The impressive thing is that the film does not try particularly hard to make Harry likeable. It gives him intelligence, wit and self- awareness, but self-awareness is not the same thing as reform. Harry knows many of the things that are wrong with him. He simply keeps doing them.
Harry’s great talent is turning life into fiction. His great failure is forgetting that the people in the life remain real after the book is finished.
Judy Davis is tremendous as Lucy because she enters the film at exactly the emotional temperature Harry deserves. Lucy has not arrived for a sophisticated conversation about the relationship between experience and art. She is furious that private events have been placed on the page and made available to strangers.
The scene establishes the rules immediately. Harry can explain, rationalise and distinguish fiction from autobiography all he likes. Lucy recognises herself. That is enough. The writer’s theoretical defence collapses the moment the subject of the story walks into the room carrying her own version of what happened.
Kirstie Alley’s Joan provides another variation. She is a psychoanalyst attempting to conduct sessions while simultaneously screaming at Harry over his latest betrayal. The collision between professional control and personal rage is wonderfully staged because neither side can remain contained.
Harry’s romantic history is not presented as a sequence of unfortunate misunderstandings. There is a pattern, and he is the pattern. The comedy comes from his astonishing ability to identify the pattern while behaving as though this particular disaster has somehow arrived independently.
Harry understands himself extremely well. The problem is that understanding has never required him to change.
The fictional episodes allow Allen to make Harry’s creative process visible. Tobey Maguire appears as Harvey Stern in a story built from adultery and death. Julia Louis-Dreyfus appears in another version of material Harry has borrowed from life. Robin Williams becomes Mel, an actor who has literally gone out of focus.
The blurred actor is one of the film’s best ideas because everybody around him can see perfectly well that something is wrong while Mel remains physically present. Doctors examine him, the camera cannot correct him and eventually his family has to respond to the absurd possibility that a human being has become photographically indistinct.
It is a visual joke, but it also fits a film obsessed with people failing to see themselves clearly. Harry can turn other people into sharply observed characters while remaining remarkably unfocused about the consequences of his own behaviour.
Fiction allows him to arrange reality. Real life keeps refusing the arrangement.
Harry can give every fictional character a shape and purpose. His own life remains the manuscript he cannot organise.
The road trip towards the university gives the film just enough structure to contain all this fragmentation. Harry needs to travel to the institution that once expelled him because it now wants to honour him. That contradiction is perfectly suited to a character whose life repeatedly turns rejection into material and material into success.
Unable to assemble a conventional group of companions, he eventually travels with Richard, his son and Cookie. Hazelle Goodman gives Cookie a directness that cuts through Harry’s elaborate explanations. She is one of the few people in the film who does not seem especially impressed by the intellectual architecture he builds around ordinary desires.
Bob Balaban’s Richard supplies friendship and a degree of normality, although even that journey refuses to proceed safely. Harry is trying to arrive at a ceremony celebrating his achievements while everything around him keeps producing evidence of what those achievements have cost.
The university represents the public version of Harry Block. The people in the car know the private one.
The university wants to celebrate the books. Harry has to arrive there surrounded by the evidence of the life behind them.
Then Allen sends him to Hell. Billy Crystal’s Devil is one of the film’s great cameos because Hell turns out to be less a theological revelation than another extension of Harry’s comic universe. Even damnation comes with bureaucracy, jokes and air conditioning.
The sequence is deliberately excessive, but it makes thematic sense. Harry has spent much of the film being told what an appalling person he is. A literal descent into Hell simply externalises the judgement everybody else has already delivered.
The more interesting question is whether Harry believes any of it. He is not religious in any conventional sense, and the film is not seriously threatening him with eternal punishment. Hell becomes one more fictional construction through which he can process guilt without necessarily allowing guilt to transform him.
That is both funny and rather bleak. Harry is capable of converting even damnation into another scene.
Even Hell cannot stop Harry being a writer. Give him eternal damnation and he immediately starts improving the dialogue.
Carlo Di Palma’s photography and Susan Morse’s editing give the film a deliberately broken rhythm. The jump cuts are not there to look fashionable. They make Harry’s life feel as though somebody has cut out the transitions.
Conversations begin, stop and restart. Memories interrupt the present. Fictional characters acquire the weight of real people. Real people appear in altered form inside the fiction. The spectator is constantly asked to reconstruct relationships from fragments.
That form suits a man with writer’s block particularly well. Harry can remember everything except how to create something new. His past has become so densely populated that there is almost no room for another story.
The film itself therefore becomes the book Harry cannot write: a collage assembled from everyone and everything he has already used.
The soundtrack moves just as freely. Annie Ross’s Twisted opens the film with a song about psychological disorder that could hardly be more appropriate. Django Reinhardt, Stan Getz, Erroll Garner, Benny Goodman and Art Tatum with Ben Webster fill other sections with jazz.
Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain appears when the film needs something altogether larger and darker. Jerome Kern, Rodgers and Hart and Cole Porter place Harry’s chaotic life against some of the most elegant popular music imaginable.
I particularly like the use of The Way You Look Tonight. Allen has returned to the song elsewhere, but here its romance exists in a film where romance has generally been treated as something Harry manages to damage.
The music supplies grace that the protagonist frequently lacks.
Harry’s life is fragmented, crude and chaotic. The jazz keeps reminding us that disorder can still produce form.
The final movement is unexpectedly generous. Harry reaches the university and receives the recognition he has wanted, but the emotional resolution comes through the imagined return of his characters. The people he has created gather around him.
That is the one relationship Harry has managed to sustain. Real people may leave, sue, threaten, divorce or refuse to speak to him. Fictional characters remain available because they exist precisely where Harry is strongest.
There is something sad about that, but also something genuinely affectionate. Allen does not excuse Harry. He allows him the one form of redemption that makes sense for the character: perhaps he has been poor at living and exceptionally good at turning the wreckage into art.
Whether that is enough depends entirely on whether you are Harry or one of the people he has written about.
Harry cannot make his life behave. He can make something out of the fact that it refused.
I think that is why Deconstructing Harry remains so fascinating. It is vulgar, angry, structurally restless and often deliberately unpleasant, yet it is also extremely controlled beneath the apparent chaos.
The title is exact. Harry is dismantled into husbands, lovers, fathers, writers, patients, adulterers and fictional projections until no single version can claim to be the whole man. Everybody knows a different Harry because Harry has behaved differently with everybody.
The film never discovers one final authentic self underneath all the pieces. I do not think it wants to. The pieces are the person.
For a film about writer’s block, it contains an extraordinary number of ideas.
Cast and Characters
Woody Allen
A celebrated novelist whose books repeatedly transform his marriages, affairs and friendships into recognisable fiction.
Judy Davis
One of Harry’s former lovers, furious after discovering that intimate details of their relationship have been used in his writing.
Kirstie Alley
Harry’s psychoanalyst former wife, whose professional composure disappears spectacularly when confronting him about another betrayal.
Elisabeth Shue
Harry’s former girlfriend, whose relationship with Larry becomes another source of resentment, jealousy and fictional material.
Hazelle Goodman
The prostitute Harry recruits as an unlikely travelling companion on his journey back to the university.
Billy Crystal
Crystal appears both within Harry’s complicated romantic life and as the Devil during the film’s exuberantly comic descent into Hell.
Jazz gives Harry’s fractured life a rhythm of its own
Annie Ross, Django Reinhardt, Erroll Garner, Stan Getz, Benny Goodman and Art Tatum with Ben Webster accompany a film that jumps between memories, fiction and reality almost as freely as jazz moves through a solo.
Twisted
Wardell Gray’s music and Annie Ross’s lyrics open the film with a witty account of psychological confusion. It is difficult to imagine a more appropriate introduction to Harry Block, a man whose professional understanding of human behaviour has done remarkably little to organise his own.
Elegant recordings around a deliberately inelegant life
The soundtrack includes Django Reinhardt, Stan Getz, Erroll Garner, Benny Goodman and the Art Tatum–Ben Webster Quartet alongside popular standards by Jerome Kern, Rodgers and Hart and Cole Porter.
Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain gives the film a more dramatic classical voice when Harry’s comic nightmare expands towards the infernal.
Out of Nowhere
Reinhardt’s performance adds one of the soundtrack’s most distinctive guitar voices to Harry’s unpredictable journey.
The Girl from Ipanema
Getz’s recording brings a completely different jazz texture into the film’s constantly shifting musical world.
The Way You Look Tonight
Erroll Garner performs the great standard, bringing romantic elegance to a story in which Harry repeatedly makes romance anything but elegant.
Sing, Sing, Sing
Benny Goodman’s famous recording adds explosive swing to a soundtrack already moving at the same restless pace as Harry’s memories.
Locations
Harry’s journey moves from familiar Manhattan streets and Central Park into New Jersey and upstate New York as he travels towards the university preparing to honour him.
Drew University
Drew University provides the principal college setting for the institution that once expelled Harry and now invites him back to celebrate his literary career.
Bethesda Fountain
The Bethesda Terrace and fountain area forms part of Harry’s recognisable Manhattan world before the film’s road journey begins.
West End Avenue
West End Avenue was among the Manhattan locations used for the apartments and streets surrounding Harry’s personal life.
Red Apple Rest
The former roadside restaurant was used during the increasingly chaotic journey towards Harry’s university ceremony.
Harry’s Manhattan
Apartments, streets and urban interiors keep the present-day story rooted in the city even while Harry’s imagination moves far beyond it.
New York to New Jersey
The physical road trip gives a deliberately fragmented film its clearest geographical line: Harry is travelling towards public honour while his private history travels with him.
Awards and Recognition
Best Original Screenplay Nomination
Woody Allen received an Academy Award nomination for Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen.
A Form Built Around Fiction
The screenplay continually moves between Harry’s life and stories based upon it, allowing fictional characters to comment directly on their creator.
An Extraordinary Cast
Judy Davis, Kirstie Alley, Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, Elisabeth Shue, Demi Moore, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Tobey Maguire are among the actors moving between Harry’s real and imagined worlds.
Susan E. Morse
The fractured cutting pattern is central to the film’s identity, allowing memory, fiction and the present to interrupt one another without warning.
Reality Becomes Material
Few Allen films examine the ethical relationship between an artist and the people used in their work as aggressively as this one.
One of Allen’s Darkest Comedies
Its explicit humour, fractured structure and deeply flawed protagonist make Deconstructing Harry one of the most confrontational comedies in the filmography.