Deconstructing Harry (1997)

Deconstructing Harry arrives in 1997 with a dirty mind and a clean conscience, which is to say it has no conscience at all and no interest in acquiring one. Woody Allen plays Harry Block, a novelist who mines his ex-wives, his lovers, and his half-sister for material and then wonders why the phone stops ringing. Three passengers ride along on his road trip: a prostitute, a friend, and a kidnapped son, which is either a premise or a diagnosis. The film moves by flashback, fantasy, and fiction, and the structure is genuinely inventive. The moral universe, however, is a shallow grave of self-pity dressed in a tweed jacket.

There is nothing here for the cultural auditor to seize upon. The cast is white, the gender politics are those of a man who thinks monogamy is a rumor, and the Black prostitute named Cookie is a character in a car, not a statement. Race, class, and climate go unmentioned. The film's only sustained argument is with its own protagonist, and it loses that argument on points. We are asked to laugh at a man who kidnaps his son and calls it a whim, and the film obliges us to find him charming. That is not a moral instruction, it is a shrug.

The picture earns a small measure of credit for refusing to pretend. It is confessional, obscene, and occasionally very funny, and it never lectures. A sermonizer would have told us what to think about Harry. Allen simply lets him talk, which is its own kind of punishment. There is also a scene in which a fictional character slides out of focus, and it is the most honest moment in the film. The whole enterprise is a man arguing with his own reflection in a dirty mirror, and the reflection wins on a technicality.