# Sweet and Lowdown (1999)

### reviewed by
Harvey S. Karten

    SWEET AND LOWDOWN

     Reviewed by Harvey Karten
     Sony Pictures Classics
     Director: Woody Allen
     Writer: Woody Allen
     Cast: Sean Penn, Samantha Morton, Uma Thurman, Brian
    Markinson, Anthony LaPaglia, Gretchen Mol

There's an old belief that to be a great artist, you have to be neurotic, or psychotic, or drunk or drug-addicted. Only people who are aberrations, who are different in temperament from the ordinary run-of-the-mill folks, can be truly creative. The brilliant guitar player who is the subject of Woody's Allen's latest movie, Emmett Ray (Sean Penn), has us going along with the adage--for a while. He is so full of himself that though he gives his all to the audience while on the stage, he cannot relate to anyone on a human level. Emmett is a repressed personality who holds back his feelings so much that he cannot stand being with one woman for too long, however loving she may be, and he is so centered on himself that he is not even aware of hurting the feelings of those he is with when telling them about all the other women whose company he has enjoyed. Ah, but later we learn that when he reaches an impasse in his life, when his oddities catch up with him and make him realize how lonely he truly is, he is ready to shuck off his ill-mannered narcissism: his music, brilliant though it had been, undergoes a warmth, a depth, a genuine improvement. The moral? If you want to attain greatness, at the very least, be normal.

Woody Allen has written and directed this film, a considerable improvement over his last work, "Celebrity," which made the fatal mistake of casting Kenneth Branagh as a stand-in for himself. Branagh, the very antithesis of the nebbishy Allen, embarrassed himself and his audience by playing so far against type that he evoked snickers, not laughter, from the audience. This time Allen stays behind the camera for the most part, appearing only now and then to narrate some commentary about the musician whose life he describes. Woody Allen, who is said to be truly relaxed and happy not when he is acting or directing but when he is behind his clarinet on Mondays at New York's Michael's Pub, is an aficionado of jazz--as shown in the recent documentary about his concert tour of Europe, "Wild Man Blues." "Sweet and Lowdown" is his paean to swing, blues, and ragtime, a mockumentary about a fictional character from the 1930s who is the world's second-best guitarist.

As interpreted by the marvelous Sean Penn, one of the major actors of his generation, Emmett Ray is booked into the lounges of fancy hotels together with a small combo but is often too drunk or too late to please an impatient audience- -if he shows up all. The self-destructive Emmett, who is scarcely aware of his own loneliness, has two hobbies: one is shooting rats in a vacant lot, the other is watching freight trains go by--the latter perhaps an evocation of lost youth, the former an expression of his frustration with isolation. He has plenty of women, but he feels nothing for them. He forms a relationship with Hattie (Samantha Morton), a most unusual tie given that Hattie is mute. She cannot speak and therefore is an ideal foil for Emmett, giving him plenty of opportunity to talk about himself and to allow us in the audience to get to know him as much as we can. Though much of the music in the movie is a delight--we are treated to old faves like "Sweet Georgia Brown," "All of Me," and "I'll See You in My Dreams"--the best scenes are of Emmett with Hattie who, lonely as her new man, follows him around and without a word of dialogue expresses every possible nuance of feeling. We know when she is jealous of the attention that other women are paying to Ray; we are aware of her utterly bleak sadness when she is finally rejected by him. When she smiles she reminds us of Federico Fellini's beloved Giulietta Massina, and does much to convince us of the 1930s setting which Allen has consummately evoked.

From time to time Nat Hentoff, Woody Allen, and other jazz enthusiasts pop up on screen to do some talking-heads spiel about this fictional Emmett Ray, and darned if they don't convince us that this guitarist really existed. Photographer Zhao Fei's camera wanders about to take in the characters who are part of Ray's life, including socialite Blanche (Uma Thurman) who is a would-be writer intent on gaining access to Ray's core and who somehow convinces him to marry her. Anthony LaPaglia turns out as a gangster-bodyguard to whom Blanche is attracted and who leads the jealous husband to track the two down to a roadside Mobilgas station where the audience is treated to three potential versions of the shootout that occurs there.

Many are saying that the picture is "sweet but slight," but such a mixed compliment does the film a disservice. Allen tells us quite a bit about what could well be the inner life of many a self-centered artist and shows us just how much an actress, the remarkable Samantha Morton, can do without a word of dialogue. No wonder the stars of the silents were threatened by talkies! Able to extract every emotion known to humankind simply by facial expressions and body language, they believed--accurately enough in so many cases--that communicating by voice would take our attention away from the more faithful renditions of sentiments. "Sweet and Lowdown" is sensitive, funny, melodious, and utterly charming.

Rated PG-13. Running Time: 105 minutes. (C) 1999 Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com

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