"Deconstructing Harry" is one of Woody Allen's most caustic movies, but it's also the most episodic film he had created since the goofy skit-comedy movies he directed in the early 1970s. Therefore, while I admired "Deconstructing Harry" for going places Allen hadn't really gone before, I also found it to be somewhat unengaging, since everything takes place at an abstract level.
The film has a dynamite conceit: Allen plays a writer who meets all of the alter egos and loosely fictionalized characters his imagination has brought to life, many of them with not very nice things to say to him. The movie has the confessional feel you might expect given the film's title, but it's broken into so many fragments that you never become involved in the narrative. The criticism is almost a compliment -- Allen recreates the feeling of spending time inside someone's (read, his) fractured psyche too well.
Grade: B
The film has a dynamite conceit: Allen plays a writer who meets all of the alter egos and loosely fictionalized characters his imagination has brought to life, many of them with not very nice things to say to him. The movie has the confessional feel you might expect given the film's title, but it's broken into so many fragments that you never become involved in the narrative. The criticism is almost a compliment -- Allen recreates the feeling of spending time inside someone's (read, his) fractured psyche too well.
Grade: B