With Deconstructing Harry, Allen persists in his chronic need to laugh rather than cry, to have us do so as well, and to beat the critics (of his work, and more recently, the conduct of his personal life) to the punch by pinning his fears and weaknesses on the big screen for all to deride. Albeit self-absorbed and insistent on projecting his bread-buttering neuroses, Allen is almost modest here: He makes shrewd, self-effacing fun of himself. A few film critics are rather snootily dismissing Deconstructing Harry as just another exercise in artistic self-justification, adolescent sexual obsessions, and pseudo-profound cliches about art and life. It very well may manifest all of those elements (and the last few minutes of the film do, indeed, come across as a weak, philosophical stab at moralizing), but these disdainful critics seem no longer capable of considering Allen’s films discretely and have, armed with the highly publicized pecaddilloes of his domestic affairs, now decided to view his work from that most dangerous perspective that film critics can be heir to, that of pop psychologist. Sad, that their insistence on biographically based commentary (constructed from issues about which they can never be certain) should preclude their seeing what we can know with certain delight: that Woody Allen has arrived – moderately morose, still whining, and with all his undisputed baggage continuingly accounted for – alongside Keaton and Chaplin, in the first ranks of American clowndom. Fortunately for most of us, we won’t feel we have succumbed to the slippery slope of moral relativism by enjoying Deconstructing Harry, one of Allen’s finest and funniest films.

Allen plays Harry Block – a writer with (yes, indeedy) writer’s block – who is self-absorbed, consumed with adolescent sexual obsessions and admittedly pseudo-profound questions about art and life. At worst, he callously uses the women in his life as fodder for his fiction’s misanthropy; at best, he is spiritually bankrupt. By film’s end, Harry may have grown only neglibly as a human being, but he has at least come up with the premise for a new book – a protagonist who is “a failure at life” but who participates in the give-and-take of life through his characters. Along the way, Allen artfully strings together some hilarious situational comedy.

Picking over the traces – of both his perpetual themes, visual and verbal humor, and, one may assume, his personal trials – he manages to succeed this time out in his will to one-upsmanship. The script is smart and funny; there’s an apotheosis of the familiar. Many sustained scenes have long pedigrees, obvious set-ups, shaggy-dog unfoldings, and shameless, vaudevillian, ta-dum! pay-offs. But far from being arid, the film percolates with fresh energy. The whole project seems tuned up several notches. (He even throws in an occasional dash of magic-realism – a trend we thought now mercifully resided on video-store shelves – and makes it work!) Allen’s sense of timing has rarely been so audacious and audiences may laugh as much at what’s being gotten away with as at what’s going on.

The usual casting formula – a celebrity repertory of medium- to cameo-sized roles – works more credibly here than on some previous occasions. Judy Davis gets a couple of juicy scenes – they rival her unforgettable “hedgehog” reverie in Allen’s Husbands and Wives – in which to deploy her full range of eccentric, naturalistic, stylistic, and just plain brilliant funniness. And in the role of Harry’s former wife, a psychotherapist, Kirstie Alley is encouraged to make a stunning comic silk purse of her customary sow’s ear of overacting. The scene in which she interrupts a session with a client to confront Harry for the sins of his past is deliciously, and perfectly, over the top. Bob Balaban, Robin Williams, Elisabeth Shue, and a host of others seem content with carrying a vignette – or even the comic equivalent of carrying a spear – as the picaresque silliness progresses.

Like Harry, Woody Allen may never create a film that moves us to the quick with the greatness of its spirit, but – for all his introspective angst and urban provincialism – he has articulated his own vocabulary of the human condition, and audiences for Deconstructing Harry may derive a deep satisfaction in watching one of America’s great humorists working away at making a good thing better.

In a scene in which our sympathies are completely with her, Harry’s former wife, the therapist, dismayed with Harry’s amorality, temporizing, and what she sees as a pathological need to fictionalize life, cries in exasperation, “For once, stop tap-dancing!”