MISSING HEAVEN, MAKING HELL

Why this mad enthusiasm for Deconstructing Harry? Because it’s the new movie starring, written by, and directed by Woody Allen, and Woody Allen occupies a position in the cultural life of New York City comparable to Steven Spielberg’s dominant position in the rest of America. If you want to understand just how sacrosanct Allen is, consider this: He has made thirty movies, and every one of them has received a favorable review in the New York Times. Every single one. Even Alice. Even Another Woman.

His status in his hometown is due less to the quality of his work than sheer parochialism. Before Mayor Giuliani cleaned up the place, Woody Allen was the only person in America who had a good word to say for New York. He lives on Fifth Avenue, almost all his movies have been set entirely in New York, and there’s often a moment in an Allen movie in which he says something like, “I don’t care what anybody says, this is a great city.”

But more important, Allen is the representative figure of New York in our time — the perfect reflection of the cultural attitudes of the city’s elite for whom intellectual name-dropping is a way of expressing their superiority to the bohunks who live beyond the Hudson.

There were entire scenes in Allen’s Manhattan almost twenty years ago that featured nothing but characters declaiming the names of the famous and not-so-famous, from Isak Dinesen to Thomas Mann. In Deconstructing Harry, the character played by Woody Allen even drops the name of Sophocles in a conversation with a prostitute.

Allen is also an idea-dropper, a sixty-two-year-old man who left college before graduating and so never had a chance to grow out of the late-night bull sessions that seem so wonderful during those years (and the memory of which brings pain to all of us who can remember what fools we made of ourselves). His intellectual obsessions are sadly puerile for a man who will soon be able to buy a Seniors ticket at the local multiplex; for instance, he mentions, yet again, his fear of an expanding universe in Deconstructing Harry.

In this respect, too, he is the perfect stand-in for New Yorkers, who believe themselves wonderfully cosmopolitan but are utterly terrified to disagree with one another (or with a critic for the Times) and can easily go through life never meeting anybody who has a thought different from their own. In Angels in America, the epic “gay fantasia on national themes” that Frank Rich believes is the greatest play of our age, all the actors had to do to get a knowing, mocking laugh from the New York audience was merely speak the words “Ed Meese.” New Yorkers knew nothing of Ed Meese except that you were supposed to hold him in contempt. The Times told them so. And so they did.

You might think Allen’s standing would have suffered from the public spectacle a few years ago after he left his girlfriend Mia Farrow for her teenage daughter (she found out when she came across pornographic photographs he had taken of the girl and was so understandably horrified that she feared he was also sexually abusing the baby daughter they had adopted together). But nobody suffers as a result of public disgrace these days, and certainly not in New York.

Still, what’s fascinating about Deconstructing Harry is that it’s a movie about being a public disgrace — a real change from his last film, the awful musical jape Everyone Says I Love You. By acknowledging, even reveling in, his ill repute, Allen has liberated himself from the preposterous pose he had been affecting as a Good Man in a Bad Time.

The New York Times was always there to act as his press agent in this regard. A year before Mia Farrow came upon the pornographic photos, the Times Magazine ran a worshipful article about Allen and Farrow’s living arrangements in which the author, Eric Lax, explained that even though they lived in separate apartments, he was closer to her kids than most live-in fathers. (That proved to be true, in a certain sense.)

Deconstructing Harry is a remarkable and shocking piece of work — the funniest Allen film in fifteen years, and unquestionably the most foul- mouthed and pornographically suggestive mainstream American movie yet made. Words are used routinely in the course of Deconstructing Harry — and by Allen, who has rarely uttered on-screen profanity before — that would get a drill sergeant at Aberdeen sentenced to life in prison without parole. What’s more, two of America’s sweethearts (Demi Moore and Julia Louis-Dreyfus of Seinfeld) perform oral sex before our weary eyes.

“I’m the worst person in the world,” cries Harry Block, Allen’s novelist character, and he’s right. “How about Hitler?” somebody says in response. ” Okay, Hitler,” Block acknowledges.

The movie cuts between Block’s pill-popping, alcoholic, hooker-infested life and scenes from the antic fiction he writes — which include a journey he takes to Hell, where he discovers that he and the devil (a hilarious Billy Crystal) have both had their way with Sheila Pepkin and the Sherman twins. ” They’re here!” the devil tells Harry. “Want to see them?”

Allen surely is going to Hell, and many people would consider Deconstructing Harry Exhibit A in the case for the prosecution. But fair is fair. When the guy chooses to be funny, he is still capable of pulling off moments more inspired than any in contemporary cinema.

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 17. If Woody Allen is going to Hell, Steven Spielberg is trying far too hard to get into Heaven — and deserves nothing more than purgatory. Though he is the most financially successful creative person in the history of the planet, Spielberg has proved time and again that he is a good storyteller only when he tries hard. He often doesn’t. Jurassic Park may have been the highest-grossing movie of all time, but it was an utter mess, and its sequel, The Lost World, was even worse — a movie so shoddy in conception and execution that it displayed real contempt for his audience.

Now he has made the second film in what will clearly be a series: Steven Spielberg Presents True Stories of Human Calamity. The new Amistad follows the Holocaust epic Schindler’s List in telling the story of men who degrade other men, this time by making slaves of them. The movie begins with the 1839 revolt on board the slave ship Amistad. The revolt’s leader is Cinque, like his fellow unfortunates a West African kidnapped by slave traders operating illegally on British territory. The ship goes aground on Long Island and the slaves are arrested, whereupon the movie becomes a series of courtroom scenes in which their rights as men are argued.

Schindler’s List really was extraordinary because, despite all the temptations, Spielberg did not surrender to piety. He made a movie about the Holocaust with a morally ambiguous figure at the center of it — a man who saved Jewish lives at first entirely for profit and then because he became compelled to beat the system. Schindler’s List had a passionate urgency, a real freshness to it. Spielberg took decades of drippy reflections on the Holocaust, peeled them all back, and showed the catastrophe anew. If he never made another film, he would be remembered for it alone.

But Amistad is purely an act of piety with all the brio of a gradeschool Thanksgiving pageant (and in the central role of Cinque’s lawyer, the embarrassing Matthew McConaughey gives a performance a fourth-grader would be ashamed of). The movie is full of Historically-Charged-Moments of the sort that never happen when people are actually making history — but which allow pageant directors like Spielberg to sneak in the little historical factoids they’ve ginned up. When we first see John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins), who eventually argues the case before the Supreme Court, he is being attacked in the House of Representatives for wanting to take the junk “from the attic of a Mr. John Smithson and turn it into a national museum.”

No conversation goes on for more than two minutes without somebody bringing up the possibility of civil war — including Adams, who discusses it before the Supreme Court. But the real-life Amistad incident took place in 1839, and the South was winning every battle with the abolitionists; it was only when the North began to succeed in restricting slavery that the civil-war talk began in earnest. Apparently, when you’re staging a pageant, you really want all the boys and girls to get the idea, no matter how vulgar you have to be.

The movie’s worst failure has to do with its portrayal of the forty-four slaves themselves. We learn almost nothing about them except that they are slaves and are really buff. Spielberg leaves unsubtitled most of what they say to each other in their African languages. Though he surely meant to convey the difficulty of their plight and their inability to communicate, his strange decision turns the slaves into nothing more than noble savages.

There are even bizarre echoes of Spielberg’s own ET, for just like that cute little alien, the Amistad slaves want only to go home.

Who could blame them? So did I.

Contributing editor John Podhoretz edits the editorial pages of the New York Post.