That’s Not Woody in ‘Harry,’ It’s Philip

Some critics, including Times film critic Kenneth Turan, loved Woody Allen’s “Deconstructing Harry,” (“When Harry Met Woody,” Calendar, Dec. 12). Others didn’t. One thing all the critics seem to agree on, though, is that Harry is a glimpse into the filmmaker’s psyche: Woody is playing Woody.

Despite a few minor details (Harry likes baseball and music and is constantly in analysis, as Allen is), I don’t think Harry is based on Woody in any substantive way.

Here is my theory: Woody has actually based this character largely on acclaimed novelist Philip Roth.

The fictional Harry, like the real-life Roth, is a best-selling author of both novels and short stories. Roth is well known for exploiting real-life relationships for his fiction and the consequences be damned; Harry alienates friends and family for the same reason.

Woody’s Harry Block is sexually obsessed and often writes of his sexual exploits (in addition to whining to his analyst about his need for them). Roth, famous for his literary navel-gazing, wrote the controversial mega-seller “Portnoy’s Complaint”--a book about a man recounting to his analyst his often deviant sexual adventures.

Woody’s creation is often accused of “anti-Semitism” and “self-hate” by the Jewish community because of how he portrays Jews in his stories. This has been a major recurring theme in Roth’s work (check out “Zuckerman Bound”).

In the film, Harry Block’s sister, much to his chagrin, has “returned to her Jewish roots” and embraced the cause of Zionism. In Roth’s “The Counterlife,” it’s his brother.

Harry Block’s lead characters are always “thinly disguised versions of himself.” Roth has made a cottage industry out of just this type of autobiographical fiction: The character Nathan Zuckerman, a novelist, appears in many of his stories as sexually obsessed, misogynistic, artistically exploitative and a bane to the Jewish community.

In “Deconstructing Harry,” the author decides in his latest work to drop all pretense of disguise entirely and just be himself. Roth did just that in the award-winning “Operation Shylock.”

In “Harry,” the author has a string of wives and girlfriends, all of whom he treats badly. Roth is also famous for both his real-life romantic adventures and his very public pain. Most recently he had a high-profile breakup with actress Claire Bloom, who went on to write an autobiography in which she painted Roth as being depressed, compulsive and mentally abusive--all attributes shared with Allen’s cinematic counterpart.

Allen even casts Richard Benjamin to play one of his cinematic alter egos in “Harry.” Benjamin served a similar purpose in the motion pictures “Portnoy’s Complaint” and “Goodbye, Columbus,” both based on--yes, you guessed it--Philip Roth novels.

Perhaps Woody shouldn’t have opted to play the character of Harry Block. He has said in interviews that he attempted to cast others first, and that might have been a wise move. Woody as a performer, while hilarious and a neurotic nonpareil, comes with too much baggage; audience members and critics alike tend to subscribe to the misguided notion that he is always playing himself.

Had another actor portrayed Harry, maybe viewers could see the film for what it really is: a brutally honest, uproariously funny, uncompromising view of a deeply flawed artist who takes something base--the neuroses, pain, misery and moral ambiguity of his real life--and, through literary alchemy and immense talent, turns it into something precious: literary gold.

Allen might be an alchemist on par with Harry Block, but that doesn’t make them one and the same.