Deconstructing Harry

Deconstructing Harry (1997) is about a writer who turns everyone in his life into material. Harry Block is a blocked novelist. His ex wives, lovers and relatives will not speak to him because he has put all of them into his books with the names slightly altered. His old university is holding a ceremony in his honour and he has nobody to take. The film runs on two levels: Harry's actual life and the stories he writes. The characters in the stories are lightly altered versions of the real people, and the two levels keep bleeding into each other. The structure comes from Bergman's Wild Strawberries: an old man setting off to receive an honour and reckoning with his past on the way. In the best section an actor goes out of focus in the middle of a set. Not the camera, the man himself is blurred. It turns out to be a condition and he is taken to a doctor. It is Allen's crudest film; the swearing, the sex and the jokes about religion are far more open than in his earlier work. The editing is deliberately abrasive; scenes are cut off mid moment and restarted. The film does not defend Harry. What emerges is that the man only functions inside fiction, and his life is what that costs. The cast is crowded; Robin Williams, Demi Moore, Billy Crystal and Kirstie Alley take small parts. It runs 96 minutes. Good for: Allen's darker period, metafiction, and black comedy. Less good for: the character is unpleasant, the humour is coarse, and the film offers no apology.