Reconstructing Woody [Commentary on film Deconstructing Harry]
105.1Abstract (summary)
In one scene [Harry Block] is about to be honoured at the university that long ago expelled him ("I tried to give the dean's wife an enema"). Adoring faculty members and students are escorting him across the campus when the police suddenly appear and arrest Harry for kidnapping his young son Hilly (Eric Lolled) . He has violated his visitation conditions and snatched the boy off the street because he wants Hilly to see his father honoured. Up to this point, the child has enjoyed the adventure - a visit to his father's half-sister (Caroline Aaron), a stop at a carnival midway - and he has had no trouble handling various surprises, such as the death of another passenger in the car and the presence of the hooker in hot pants (Hazelle Goodman) whom Harry has brought along for moral support. Under these circumstnces, the reaction of Harry's ex-wife,Jean (Kirstie Alley), is clearly unfair to the loving and well-meaning father. Typically, Allen presents Harry as a slightly flawed mortal who cowers under the severity of others' criticism: a court jester more sinned against than sinning. What is especially significant about the scene is that it reaches beyond the film to allude to the public saga of Allen's life. Through Harry Block, Allen portrays himself as an innocent, maliciously accused of vile deeds. To paraphrase an old Allen gag, "I'm innocent - but with an explanation."
The "deconstructing" seems to place Allen in the critical vanguard of the moment. To some extent the film does deconstruct Harry, as his former lovers subject him to unsparing criticism. But Allen also uses "deconstruction" to deny any objective fixity in his fiction, to repose his meaning in his readers' dispositions. As one serious student in Harry's last fantasy declares, she enjoys "deconstructing" his apparently sad stories because she finds them cheerier than he realizes. Harry (and Allen?) hopes that his reader will find more positive virtues in his work than he put in. If the reader is more responsible for the meaning of a work than the author is, that lets the author off the hook of accountability. By extension: the stories told about Allen are the tellers' fault, not his. And when Harry lives something like the scandals of Allen's life, it's Allen, not just the character he plays, for whom the film implicitly claims victimization by unjust perspectives. Allen's comically culpable hero is Allen's claim to innocence in his real-life trials. Allen is not so much deconstructing his Harry Block as reconstructing his own lost, lovable victim persona. As the film cuts between "real" scenes of Block's life, his memories, and the fictions he "loosely" bases on them, the viewer is manoeuvred away from defining Allen and back into the pleasures of a playful persona.
At the end of Deconstructing Harry, Harry is alone, but he finds solace in dreaming a visit from the college people who were going to honour him, then an applauding audience of all his real life and fictional associates. This fantasy would normally be read as a retreat into solipsist madness. But Allen's affable persona makes for a more positive reading, in which we suspend our judgement. Harry has overcome his writer's block and is working on a new novel about a character who can't handle life so he creates fiction: i.e., himself. "I can't function in the world we have," Harry says, when he's visited in his jail cell by his newly dead friend, [Richard Benjamin] (Bob Balaban). Advised by the recently deceased to take happiness simply in being alive, Harry is released from prison when he agrees to give his blessing to the marriage of his ex-wife [Fay] and his ex-friend ([Billy Crystal]).
Woody Allen is not the only individual who wishes his private life had remained more private (ask Bill Clinton), but he is in a unique position to strike back at those he feels have tarred him unjustly. Since his much publicized breakup with Mia Farrow, Allen has made a number of interesting films, some of which have hinted at his on-screen troubles. But in his most recent release he comes out swinging, and whether his longtime fans love this film or hate it, they will have no doubt that this is a milestone in the director's long career.
WOODY ALLEN's new film, Deconstructing Harry, seems an attempt to clear himself against the rumours and accusations that have undermined his persona and challenged the faith of his audience. Allen plays Harry Block, a novelist who has turned the intimacies and anxieties of his own life into successful fiction. The film intercuts scenes from Block's life, his memories, and his writings. The ambiguous borders between life and art, being and persona, are familiar Woody Allen territory, not just for his films (and his earlier stand-up comedy career) but for his life as widely chronicled in the recent press.
In one scene Block is about to be honoured at the university that long ago expelled him ("I tried to give the dean's wife an enema"). Adoring faculty members and students are escorting him across the campus when the police suddenly appear and arrest Harry for kidnapping his young son Hilly (Eric Lolled) . He has violated his visitation conditions and snatched the boy off the street because he wants Hilly to see his father honoured. Up to this point, the child has enjoyed the adventure - a visit to his father's half-sister (Caroline Aaron), a stop at a carnival midway - and he has had no trouble handling various surprises, such as the death of another passenger in the car and the presence of the hooker in hot pants (Hazelle Goodman) whom Harry has brought along for moral support. Under these circumstnces, the reaction of Harry's ex-wife,Jean (Kirstie Alley), is clearly unfair to the loving and well-meaning father. Typically, Allen presents Harry as a slightly flawed mortal who cowers under the severity of others' criticism: a court jester more sinned against than sinning. What is especially significant about the scene is that it reaches beyond the film to allude to the public saga of Allen's life. Through Harry Block, Allen portrays himself as an innocent, maliciously accused of vile deeds. To paraphrase an old Allen gag, "I'm innocent - but with an explanation."
Of course, Allen continues to contend that there is no relationship between himself and the characters he plays. As he ingenuously told a New York Times interviewer, "I'm nothing like Harry.... I've never used the lives of my friends in fiction, like Harry. I've done 27 films, and never once has anyone complained." But such scenes as the kidnapping and its aftermath make this film too close to Allen's life for the viewer's comfort.
Pay the film its due. As usual, Allen has delivered what is arguably the most interesting, provocative, and literate American film of the year. But it has a moral ambivalence at its core that makes it deeply troubling. The film is witty and trenchant as it plays peekaboo in that limbo between the artist and his persona. This is what we have come to expect of Woody Allen since What's New, Pussycat? ( 1965) . But as his "private" life - i.e., the one lived out in the tabloid headlines - has grown more problematic, the precise relationship between his life and his art grows more vexing. Just how "loosely" is his art based on his life? It's no longer a matter of wondering which of the early Allen schlemiel's fumbling failings reflect Woody himself. Is he really that bad in bed? Does he really throw up in airports? Does he really suffer mock-heroic delusions of adequacy? Now it's a question of calibrating how dangerously indulgent the artist and deceptive the man may be. Deconstructing Harry, which at first laugh seems to be his bravest and most candid film yet, turns out rather to be an evasive, trivializing attempt to declare himself innocent - but without facing the charges.
The darling of the intelligentsia first tripped on his clay feat when his lover, Mia Farrow, discovered he had been taking nude photographs of her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, who was then 21. Woody was revealed to have been conducting a full-blown affair with a girl to whom he was functionally, if not formally, a stepfather. Rather disinclined to cool the matter, Ms Farrow then charged her erstwhile mate with molesting their adopted daughter, Dylan. Though Allen was cleared of all charges, he is not allowed unsupervised visits with his children and (at this writing) has not seen his son since.
Despite the scandal, Allen proceeded to finish the film he was making with Ms Farrow, their thirteenth and last film together. That was Husbands and Wives (1992). There Allen played a middle-aged English professor (is there any other kind these days?) who, in a shaky marriage, resists the temptation offered by a young but very experienced student. The film was released into the shadow of the Allen-Farrow scandal. Indeed, in one Seattle multiplex, which ran it in two cinemas, viewers could choose between the room marked "Mia" and the one marked "Woody." Mia outdrew Woody handily.
In Husbands and Wives two couples learn to lower their expectations of life, especially marriage. At film's end, the Allen character, Gabe Roth (see below), is left by his passive-aggressive wife, Judy (Farrow). As her previous husband declares, "Some way or another she gets what she wants." One squirms at how Allen cast Farrow as a manipulative shrew who begs him to give her a baby. "Do you ever hide things from me?" she asks. But though he's considering a fling with his 21-year-old student, Rain (Juliette Lewis), he's innocent - in the film. Judy finally marries the handsome romantic (Liam Neeson) who had earlier fallen in love with her best friend, Sally (Judy Davis). At the start of the film Sally and Jack (Sidney Pollock), the Roths' best friends, separate but they are sadly reunited at the end. Their marriage remains a tenuous "buffer against loneliness," with its sexual problems unresolved and their disappointment and resentment mutual. As Gabe declines his beautiful student - the saintly prof kisses her only at her birthday request - he emerges the least compromised character of the group.
This hard, perceptive film seemed genuinely to confront the issues percolating in Woody's mind - and points south - at the time. But his real-life affair then cast his work in a more dubious light. For what had so distinguished his mature work - in addition to his ever-ready art and wit - was a traditionalist moral position that transcended Hollywood hedonism. Suddenly, what was arguably his masterpiece - the Iyrical Manhattan (1979) - became a work of unbearable hypocrisy. In retrospect, the Allen character's cute affair with the 17-year-old high-school student (Mariel Hemingway) came to fore-shadow Allen's sexual amorality. Now, in the anatomy classroom scene where Isaac (Allen) lectures Yale (Michael Murphy) on the need for personal integrity, Allen seems less to uphold self-restraint than to preach precisely against what he practises. That's enough to sink any masterpiece, especially one drawn in such shimmering moral (and aesthetic) tones of black and white. So too the chill of Crimes and Misdemeanors (1992), where his moral exemplar is a blind rabbi (Sam Waterston) and where a respected physician (Martin Landau) gets away with murder - and high-society hypocrisy. Here again Allen's character (Cliff Stern) has a serious, pseudo-dating relationship with his ten-year-old niece (Jenny Nichols) that seems unsettlingly to anticipate Ms Farrow's allegations against her partner.
In response to the scandal, Allen bided his time, producing a series of lightweight entertainments: Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), Bullets Over Broadway ( 1994), Mighty Aphrodite ( 1995), Everybody Says I Love You (1996), and even dipping into the dreaded realm of television - zipless revivals of Don't Drink the Water (1994) and The ~Sunshine Boys ( 1995). He seemed to be trying to win back an audience with untroubled amusements that did not raise the gnawing questions about his own morality, as lived versus as vaunted. With Deconstructing Harry, however, Allen returns to his high ground, aesthetically and morally.
But he can't quite shake that scandal. It's still in our minds, and it must remain, understandably, in his. The arrest scene frenzy seems calculated to erase any suspicions about those charges involving Allen and Farrow's children. Of course the situations aren't quite the same. But by playing an innocent wrongly charged - perhaps guilty of a minor indiscretion here and there, but generally a well- meaning guy - Allen plants the idea that he has been equally maligned in the real-life allegations. Far from confronting his real-life issues here, Allen presents lighter, comic analogues of them, presumably with the intention of winning our wholesale sympathy, approval, and credence - not just for the character and the persona but for the man. It's a more ambitious piece of sleight-of- hand than any of his magician figures ever attempted. And because personae are usually more convincing than people (did the real Ronald Reagan ever stand up?) it just might work.
When Harry Block drives to his Alma Mater to be honoured, the framework returns Allen to his familiar Bergman context. The plot recalls the elderly Dr Isaac Borg's trip through memory lane towards his special honour in Wild Strawberries. In both films the memories expose a selfish, cold life, for which forgiveness and a family are the only antidote. Where Bergman's geezer is generally liked, however, Allen's Block is constantly excoriated for his selfishness and insensitivity, both in how he conducts his affairs and in exposing their intimacies in his fiction. One is hard pressed to recall another film whose hero is so thoroughly vilified - even by himself ("I may hate myself, but it's not for being Jewish") .
The "deconstructing" seems to place Allen in the critical vanguard of the moment. To some extent the film does deconstruct Harry, as his former lovers subject him to unsparing criticism. But Allen also uses "deconstruction" to deny any objective fixity in his fiction, to repose his meaning in his readers' dispositions. As one serious student in Harry's last fantasy declares, she enjoys "deconstructing" his apparently sad stories because she finds them cheerier than he realizes. Harry (and Allen?) hopes that his reader will find more positive virtues in his work than he put in. If the reader is more responsible for the meaning of a work than the author is, that lets the author off the hook of accountability. By extension: the stories told about Allen are the tellers' fault, not his. And when Harry lives something like the scandals of Allen's life, it's Allen, not just the character he plays, for whom the film implicitly claims victimization by unjust perspectives. Allen's comically culpable hero is Allen's claim to innocence in his real-life trials. Allen is not so much deconstructing his Harry Block as reconstructing his own lost, lovable victim persona. As the film cuts between "real" scenes of Block's life, his memories, and the fictions he "loosely" bases on them, the viewer is manoeuvred away from defining Allen and back into the pleasures of a playful persona.
Of course, what we know of the real Allen makes this play with his persona both more dangerous and more delicious. For example, Harry Block's womanizing, his ambiguous reflection in his heroes, and the allegations that his satire is anti-Semitic and exploitative of his women seem to allude to Philip Roth, who (coincidentally?) is Mia Farrow's current love interest. This implication is confirmed by casting Richard Benjamin, who starred in the 1969 film version of Roth's Goodbye Columbus, as Harry's fictional representation in his novel. This cuteness recalls Allen's parody of Warren Beatty's Reds (1981) in Zelig (1983) - the quest to Russia, the testimony of the "witnesses" - which Allen made when his Diane Keaton was living with Beatty. But the present case is meaner spirited than Allen's earlier dig. Allen's "Roth," Block, frequents whores, has an affair with his wife's (even more neurotic) sister Lucy (Judy Davis), and is en route to a tryst with Lucy when he meets and seduces Fay (Elisabeth Shue), the young woman who will become his adoring new lover. True to the writers' fraternity, though, when Lucy learns that she and her sister have both been betrayed by Harry, Allen plays the scene for laughs at Lucy's expense.
This meaner spirit smacks through the script's vulgarity, which is unprecedented in a Woody Allen film. The sexual profanity and the characters' fixation upon oral sex reek of Roth's Portnoy. This is a far cry from Allen's familiar bawdry, such as Alvy Singer realizing that he has been trying to do to a Republican worker what Eisenhower has been doing to the country. Whether this coarseness is part of Allen's satire against Phillip Roth or a deliberate attempt to come out of his familiar character, the mean-spirited tone suggests perhaps even a new disdain for his audience. If he is extravagantly stooping to re-conquer this audience, he seems to think they want vulgarity.
The film is even more pointed when it alludes to Allen's publicized life. The assault on Block by his past lovers, his half-sister, and his therapist inevitably reflect the abuse Allen has incurred of late. The ludicrous tirade he writes for Block's ex-wife Joan (Kirstie Alley as an up-the-wall psychiatrist) invites (for all we know, unfair) identification with Farrow and the witnesses she produced to support her charges. By casting Mariel Hemingway (his underage love in Manhattan) as Beth Kramer, a frumpy matron who tattles on Harry for giving his son an unorthodox lesson in sex education, Allen gets back at any friends who may have turned against him. Harry's/Allen's claims to special liberties as an artist would hold up in no court but the narrowing band of public opinion.
As it happens, the 62-year-old Allen married the 27-year-old Soon-Yi Previn in Venice hard upon the film's release. How better to defend his December-April marriage than to present himself as candidly self- critical, courageously confronting his critics' charges? For example, his Harry denies charges of anti-Semitism by claiming to oppose only the "exclusionary" tendency of religion. When Harry has an expert Chinese whore - a heavily made-up exotic, in marked contrast to the wholesome-looking Soon-Yi - initiate his fictional alter ego, Allen seems to ward off charges of sexual impropriety.
Allen's impressive cast makes another extra-textual point: the scandal has not damaged the filmmaker - at least not in the industry. When Woody beckons, Demi Moore, Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Judy Davis, Kirstie Alley, Eric Bogosian, Amy Irving, Julia Louis- Dreyfus; Richard Benjamin, all sorts of luminaries, rush to do a cameo or a character virtually free for the maestro. The casting works as Allen's show of power. Where's Mia?
NONE of this is to deny the brilliance liance of the film. It's an excellent depiction of an artist struggling with his writer's block. When the writer is named Block, then his block is, of course, himself. In the macrofilm, Allen has to overcome his "self," his public disrepute, to return to serious filmmaking. So he inflects his persona, in effect inoculating himself against public rejection by performing minor but cognate villainies for which we can readily forgive him.
In perhaps the film's most brilliant invention, Robin Williams plays an actor in one of Harry's short stories who suddenly finds himself physically out of focus. As Harry's analyst interprets this, "you expect the whole world to adjust to the distortion you've become." But this conceit also embodies the limbo between actor and role, between being and performing. For the actor carries into his real life a difficulty incurred in his screen performance. He "catches" the blur of the lens through which he is conveyed to the viewer. The medium infects the performer. That gag is a reversal of Allen's personal contamination of his screen persona. In a fit of nerves Allen's character briefly suffers the same loss of focus. In a similar emblem of self-refer-entiality, Harry describes the ultimate intimacy in a relationship as the woman taking control of the channel changer. In this view a relationship is simply a way to shift between fantasies.
Deconstructing Harry seems to grow directly out of Husbands and Wives, as if nothing intervened to disrupt Allen's chain of thought. As it happens, in the earlier film Allen's character refers to a student's short story, "Oral Sex in the Age of Deconstruction." That could be this film. Jack's colleague (the elegant comic novelist, Bruce Jay Friedman) recommends a call-girl in such un-Allenian grossness that he prefigures the indelicacy of Deconstructing Harry. Indeed, Judy breaks off with Gabe just as he recalls their romantic viewing of Wild Strawberries. Also, in both films psychiatrists have affairs with patients, and the psychiatrists lose their equilibrium.
The new film also amplifies the occasional use of jump-cuts within a scene. In Deconstructing Harry the technique suggests a fragmentation of experience, whether for analysis or in quotation. The opening titles are intercut with a montage repeating the irate Lucy's arrival at Harry's apartment, when she plans to kill him for writing about their affair. The implication is that it is Harry's critics who are irrational, disjointed, not Harry. In the end, Block's new novel is about "a fragmented, disjointed existence." This theme is reflected again in the film's music. Where Husbands is framed by a Dixieland version of the film's subject - "What is This Thing Called Love?" - Harry has Annie Ross's "Twisted" - "My analyst told me, I was right outta my head."
Where Husbands and Wives formally alternated scenes of "life" with scenes of analysis (interviews, interrogation), the later film, though it also has scenes with analysts, alternates life and fiction. In fact, for the first time Allen starts with a film within a film; the pastoral barbecue scene is a visualization of Harry's novel, not his life. Though Gabe's autobiographical novel is quoted in the earlier film, Deconstructing Harry uniquely dramatizes the hero's novel and several short stories. Of course, in Husbands Judy was already uneasy about how Gabe used their private experiences in his writing. Gabe quotes Rain's story: "Life doesn't imitate art; it imitates bad TV." Judy uses her poems to seduce Michael, and Gabe's temptation by Rain begins when he lends her the typescript of his novel.
At the end of Deconstructing Harry, Harry is alone, but he finds solace in dreaming a visit from the college people who were going to honour him, then an applauding audience of all his real life and fictional associates. This fantasy would normally be read as a retreat into solipsist madness. But Allen's affable persona makes for a more positive reading, in which we suspend our judgement. Harry has overcome his writer's block and is working on a new novel about a character who can't handle life so he creates fiction: i.e., himself. "I can't function in the world we have," Harry says, when he's visited in his jail cell by his newly dead friend, Richard (Bob Balaban). Advised by the recently deceased to take happiness simply in being alive, Harry is released from prison when he agrees to give his blessing to the marriage of his ex-wife Fay and his ex-friend (Billy Crystal).
At the end of Husbands and Wives Gabe was also alone, happy to be free from his wife and free to do his work, and above the turmoil of the loins. Gabe declares that he is writing another novel, less confessional, more political. For the last line he faces the camera: "Can I go? Is this over?" The ambiguity of this direct address recalls the similar opening of Annie Hall, where the filmmaker teased the parallels of Alvy losing Annie and Allen losing Diane Keaton. But in Husbands and Wives it's as if Allen is pretending not to be in control. He poses as the manipulated subject of the analyst/interviewer/camera, when in fact he is the presiding creator. He playfully pretends he is not the one responsible. In Deconstructing Harry this pretence moves from an ironic gag to driving force.
IN Deconstructing Harry, Allen spurns no opportunity to score payback points. Harry's irate ex-mistress Lucy refers to "retarded talk show hosts." Here - and in her rage that Harry takes "everyone's suffering and turn[s] it into gold" - she speaks Allen's anger at the media coverage of his "case." In Harry's short story one whole floor of hell is filled up with "media" people, just one level up from the man who invented aluminum siding. When Harry and his shrink agree that his writing saved his life, it's easy to believe Allen is speaking about himself. At last he's back on the mainstream of his imagination - and his market - dealing with his most serious concerns. But the actor is still not clear of the troubled ambivalence of his persona. It's no longer enough to hide behind the cute helplessness of "I have not grown up." That may excuse Harry Block, but not Woody Allen.
MAURICE: YACOWAR is Dean of the faculty of Fine Arts, University of Calgary, and author of Loser Take All: The Comic Art of Woody Allen (Continuum, 1991).
Word count: 3597
Copyright Queen's quarterly Spring 1998
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