Deconstructing Woody
Could the nefariousness he packs into Harry be Allen's truest confession? Or has he created a character so absurdly cretinous that he's flipping a smug finger at the media?

DECONSTRUCTING HARRY
With Kirstie Alley, Judy Davis, Demi Moore, Billy Crystal
Written and Directed by Woody Allen

LET'S FACE IT: Woody Allen will never make an innocent movie again. We know too much about the exigencies of his life and how he's obsessed with sex, death, philosophy, religion, art, culture and his own myriad, self-destructive idiosyncrasies.

So in Deconstructing Harry, Allen casts himself as Harry Block, a novelist who, by his own admission, is immature, egocentric, reprehensible, anhedonic, vain, cowardly, friendless, soulless, angry at life, spiritually bankrupt, obsessed with prostitutes and unable to function in the real world, escaping instead to his art, where his gift for words can create imaginary worlds that salve his neuroses and revenge all the people he can't forgive, even though he's the one who needs to beg forgiveness of them.

Harry has two ex-wives: A woman (Amy Irving) with whose high-strung sister (Judy Davis) he had a passionate affair, and then cheated on both of them with a young blonde (Elisabeth Shue) who later left him for a slightly younger older man (Billy Crystal); and a flaky psychologist (Kirstie Alley) with whom he now shares a pre-teen son.

Harry can only see his son under a strict custody order. So when he wants to take him to his college alma mater, where he'll be honored with an award, he snatches the boy from his teacher after school and heads upstate, joined by a hypochondriac friend (Bob Balaban) who really happens to be sick, and a munificent black call girl who attends the dignified occasion in pink vinyl hot pants and a halter.

That's half of what you get in Deconstructing Harry. The other half brings to life scenes from Harry's comic novels and stories, each a thinly veiled literal or emotional roman-a-clef: In one story, which enrages his ex-sister-in-law-cum-lover, a Harry-like writer (Richard Benjamin) has sex with the sister (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) of his psychologist-wife (Demi Moore). In another, an old Jewish man (like Harry's acrid father) has an old Jewish wife who learns late in their marriage that the man was married before and murdered and ate his first family. There's a young married guy who hires an Asian call girl and answers the door after oral sex, only to find the Grim Reaper summoning him. There's an actor (Robin Williams) who's out of focus: not his image on film, but the actor himself, who appears blurry to all who look at him (that's how Harry feels about his life).

Thus Deconstructing Harry turns life into art, then turns it back again, and then turns it back once more. If it's not quite a work of comic genius, then it's pretty close: It may be Allen's best film since Annie Hall, which shares a lot with Deconstructing Harry, especially in how it subverts its own reality to fictionalize Harry's already fictional life. The literary theory called deconstruction claims that all narratives unravel because of the their hidden agendas and subconscious meanings. So Allen saves us the trouble and unravels his film for us.

Harry Block's bizarre fictions are a lot like the ones Allen published a generation ago in The New Yorker: Stories like "The Whore of Mensa,"where a man can buy an evening with a neurotic, high-IQ Jewish call girl who'll discuss Kant, throw a screaming fit at Elaine's and fake the suicide of your choosing; or "The Kugelmass Episode,"wherein a professor of humanities at City College finds himself thrust into Madame Bovary.

These stories were fanciful products of Allen's intellectual fixations. Later, as a filmmaker, he became overtly "autobiographical," though his brand of confessional movies tends to expose his psychosexual preoccupations, not necessarily the literal facts of his life. The ex-wives in Deconstructing Harry don't bear even the vaguest resemblance to Allen's most notable past partners, like Louise Lasser, Mia Farrow, and especially not Diane Keaton, with whom Allen is still close.

So as Allen routs his old literary tendencies, he tells a story of a man much like himself--at least, like we've come to believe he is. Could the sheer magnitude of nefariousness he packs into Harry Block be Allen's truest confession? Or has he created a character so absurdly cretinous that he's flipping a smug finger at the media and amplifying their scorn to darkly comic levels? Harry says he likes hookers and young women because he doesn't want to grow up, and he writes because he can't find a way to live in the real world. Yet even though Harry is gloriously unlikable for most of the movie, Allen ultimately seems to embrace the notion that art excuses just about anything.

I would have liked it better if Allen had suggested that Harry's kind of moral corruption is a characteristic of the artist that we should tolerate, even if it disturbs us. Allen laces his dialogue with contradictions about whether we should believe the autobiographical nature of art, or whether it's all just a product of an artist's wild imagination. He scolds Harry more than he justifies his betrayal of the women in his life, who are all quite shrill, and understandably so. He's turned them into harpies with his lies and infidelities.

Deconstructing Harry is the sort of movie that invites extreme reactions, and already it's made a few "10 best" and "10 worst" lists. It probably doesn't deserve to be on either: It's too original to be awful and too contrived to be great. I also suspect a lot of people will ultimately think--and they may be right--that Allen is just doing a half-hearted mea culpa and begging us to forgive him because he's a serious artist.

All of that aside, Deconstructing Harry is a hilarious black comedy, with more visual energy than any Allen movie in a decade, and a confluence of sharp one-liners that flow as much from character as from situations. (Lately Allen's gags have often felt more manufactured than organic.)

The movie opens and closes with a cool jazz version of the funky Annie Ross song "Twisted." The dialogue is mercilessly crude: Harry teaches his son phrases like "banging beaver," and he talks constantly of blow jobs, which he can coax from a woman even at her father's funeral because, she tells him, he's so good with words. (That's one of Allen's, not Harry's, many touches of thoroughgoing vanity.)

Allen's flawless cast is completely at ease, and the many celebrity cameos--which include Eric Bogosian, Mariel Hemingway, Julie Kavner and Stanley Tucci--don't interfere because we expect to star-gaze at a Woody Allen movie. It's hard to believe that Allen wanted Elliott Gould to play Harry Block and only took the part himself when Gould couldn't get out of another contract. Only Allen could play this part, and he does it with the most subdued acting of his career. Smart, funny, intimate and original, Deconstructing Harry isworth putting up with the guy who made it.

Allen Town
Woody revisits his old stomping grounds - which haven't changed much, but that's okay.

CELEBRITY
With Kenneth Branagh, Judy Davis, Leonardo DiCaprio, lots more
Written and Directed by Woody Allen

"YOU CAN TELL A LOT about a society by who it chooses to celebrate," a TV reporter says in Woody Allen's Celebrity. "We did a piece on Sunny Von Bulow. And she's just a coma patient. She just lays there."

The speaker is Robin Simon (Judy Davis), a schoolteacher who becomes a popular TV personality when she falls in love with a producer (Joe Mantegna) in the wake of her divorce from Lee Simon (Kenneth Branagh), a 40ish novelist and magazine writer having a midlife crisis.

In their separate personal lives, Lee and Robin each try to achieve a new state of happiness. One does. The other doesn't. And in their intersecting careers, they met and interview a lot of famous people - performers, artists, doctors, priests - which gives Allen permission to take us on a picaresque-cum-burlesque journey among a coterie of fictionalized New York acting, literary and art-world luminaries, whom he's been loving and hating in his movies for decades now.

Where Allen's last movie, Deconstructing Harry, was a psychological roman a clef about his life, Celebrity is a pastiche of elements drawn from his copious canon, and especially from his work in the 1970s - the period that gave us Annie Hall, Manhattan and Stardust Memories, the three earlier Allen films that Celebrity most resembles.

Celebrity takes a trendy, late-90s look at media culture and fame, about which it has absolutely nothing new or enlightening to say. But this comic invective comes from an East Coast intellectual insider, not some West Coast hack or 15-minute wanna-be, and you can draw many straight lines from Celebrity to its counterpart styles, themes, characters and jokes in Allen's earlier movies.

It's sometimes hilarious, always amusing, remarkably well-assembled, smart about fame in obvious and subtler ways - and only morose here and there, despite Allen's dreary (and useless) black-and-white photography. So it's reasonably good Woody, partly because it's so reassuringly familiar to his long-time followers and partly because it made me laugh out loud.

Allen doesn't appear in Celebrity, but he might as well have: He directs Branagh to a performance that's often embarrassing to watch because of how precisely the actor initates his director's physical twitches, vocal stammers, nasal whine and ponderous, self-absorbed on-screen persona. It's almost as weird and uncomfortable as Mia Farrow's early work for Allen, when he had Farrow impersonate his earlier muse, Diane Keaton.

Branagh's character in Celebrity, along with his foil, portrayed by Davis, are ultimately the two least interesting things about the movie, although Branagh's version of the Woody character is suitably complex and contemptible. You might say Allen felt freer to make the guy a jerk because he didn't have to play the role himself.

The pleasure of Celebrity comes from Allen's myriad comic set pieces that skewer the rich and famous: A plastic surgeon who hops from patient to patient like a squirrel gathering nuts (which most of his patients are); a TV priest who runs a retreat for fans in need of spiritual cleansing; a supermodel (Charlize Theron) who's taught herself to attain orgasm at a mere touch; a vivacious but vacuous actress (Melanie Griffith) who visits the home where she gruw up and remembers how she "used to lay naked on my bed watching my body develop."

There's also a bad-boy actor (Leonardo DiCaprio in a flashy short role) who screams at his girlfriend, trashes his hotel room and humps a groupie as Branagh lies next to him in bed, limply cuddling an anorexic plaything that the actor provided for him. And finally, there's a young movie extra (Winona Ryder) who's trying to become an actress and who catches the eye of Branagh's character the way young women always do with older men in Woody Allen movies - though with Branagh, who is in his early 40s, it makes more sense than it does when Allen, who is in his 60s, plays the role.

Bebe Neuwirth has a cameo as a call girl who uses a banana to simulate fellatio and then nearly chokes to death on her teaching tool. Andre Gregory passes by as a pretentious art film director. Isaac Mizrahi plays a pretentious artist. The movie burgeons with crowded scenes in theaters, galleries and private parties - one of them at Elaine's, a favorite Allen hangout in Manhattan. In fact, Celebrity may have the largest cast of any Woody Allen movie yet.

The funniest gag in Celebrity comes during a sendup of TV talk shows when Davis turns away a "teen-aged obese acrobat" who'd been invited to appear on a show about "overweight achievers," but who shows up on the wrong day. In the context of the moment, the eventual punchline - which involves skinheads, bagels and a rabbi - is a scream. In the body of Allen's work, it's typically smart, perfectly timed and a little bit surreal. That's how I'd sum up Celebrity, which will give you something to talk about - as all Woody Allen movies do.