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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Rising star Samantha Morton shines in this charming, finely crafted film from Woody Allen.
Dec 3, 1999 | It's never a good idea to underestimate a charming, nicely crafted trifle like Woody Allen's "Sweet and Lowdown." Movies that can so effortlessly fox trot you into another time and place for a few hours are rare enough these days. But I can't remember the last time I settled in to enjoy a movie that I knew was going to please me with its gags, its breezy dialog, its satiny look, only to be knocked for a loop -- to fall deeply, deeply in love -- with a specific performance I couldn't have been prepared for. "Sweet and Lowdown" is undeniably pleasant, but British actress Samantha Morton quietly explodes it: Her performance is like nothing I've seen in recent years.
If you were to break Allen's career down into individual five-year rotations, "Sweet and Lowdown" would represent a sunny spot in the latest cycle, especially after the facile and bitterly misogynist "Celebrity" (1998) and the depressingly retrograde sexual politics of "Mighty Aphrodite" (1995). "Sweet and Lowdown" is the kind of effervescent entertainment Allen's capable of making when he takes a breather from pawing desperately at his own neuroses, which ceased to be even remotely interesting long ago (except as they surface in wry amusements like 1993's "Manhattan Murder Mystery," where the fear-of-aging subtext enhances the story instead of sabotaging it).
"Sweet and Lowdown" follows the career of fictional '30s jazz guitarist Emmet Ray (Sean Penn), a professional who's cocksure of his own brilliance except when the subject of Django Reinhardt comes up: Then he turns to jelly, knowing that he's simply no match. Ray is a cartoon sharpster with a pencil moustache and a pompadour that's glazed and pouffed to an almost inhuman scale. Perpetually talking out of the side of his mouth, he's loaded with white hipster jive -- in fact, it's the only way he knows how to communicate. He's less a flesh-and-blood man than a conglomeration of bodacious one-liners ("First time I had sex, 7 years old") who happens to play guitar like a fiend. On the road constantly, he's an unapologetic ladies' man, until he meets Hattie (Morton), a simple-minded, mute laundress. He falls in a kind of love with her -- but even then, when he invites her to come along on the road with him, he's got her changing flat tires as well as doing laundry (his excuse is that he doesn't want to risk damaging his fingers).
Allen, who both wrote and directed, charts a rambling biographical profile for Ray, complete with documentary-style comments from jazz experts like Nat Hentoff. The picture moves along as a series of vignettes, some of them (one explaining Ray's involvement in a gas-station holdup, for instance) told from more than one point of view, in recognition of the fact that jazz lore is loaded with alternate endings, reckless embellishments and outright fabrications. Allen uses his lightest touch in pulling off some wonderful sight gags, as when Ray gets the idea that he wants to be lowered to the stage in a giant crescent moon as part of his act. He has the moon built to his specifications (out of what appears to be the finest plywood) and then painted and decorated; its shaky descent from the rafters, not to mention what comes after, is sheer silent-comedy style delight.
Allen has a great feel for the '30s; it's a period that always seems to loosen him up, as it did in the 1994 "Bullets Over Broadway." His overwhelming fondness for traditional jazz doesn't hurt any either. Even if you don't recognize tunes like the Ted Lewis Orchestra's "Clarinet Marmalade" (the name alone is so delicious it bears mentioning), you can't miss how the music Allen uses (under the direction of arranger and conductor Dick Hyman) wraps every scene in just the right mood. And cinematographer Zhao Fei ("Raise the Red Lantern") works magic with the dusty roses and greens of nightclub interiors and the cheerfully shabby insides of roadside motels. The whole movie is enveloped by a lush nimbus; it's not so much the glow of nostalgia as it is a gentle reminder that this era is long past, and there's no going back.
It's a relief to find Allen assembling his typically stellar ensemble of actors and actually giving them good work to do. (His misuse of terrific actors like Judy Davis and Kenneth Branagh in "Celebrity" still rankles me.) When Uma Thurman slinks into her first scene, looking more like Marlene Dietrich than ever and wearing a tuxedo just as Dietrich did in "Morocco," she just about smokes off the screen. As the eccentric heiress that Ray impulsively marries, she looks completely at home decked out in Chinese robes and wielding long cigarette holders. John Waters has a far-
