Sweet and Lowdown
USA 1999
Reviewed by Jonathan Romney
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Various jazz experts, including Woody Allen, tell the story of the great but obscure 30s guitarist Emmet Ray, a player second only to Django Reinhardt, but an obnoxious and dishonest womaniser. Cruising for girls on the New Jersey boardwalk, Emmet meets Hattie, a mute laundress, and they become lovers. She accompanies him on a cross-country trip to Hollywood, where he plays in a short film; Hattie is spotted by a director and enjoys a brief screen career. Emmet's recording career takes off but his manager warns him about his spending.
Later, after Emmet has left Hattie, he meets and marries Blanche, a wealthy would-be bohemian writer. When Emmet is sacked from a club, Blanche goes to intercede with its gangster owner and ends up running away with his henchman Al Torrio. Different versions are told of Emmet's pursuit of them. Emmet returns to New Jersey to see Hattie, but she tells him she is married with children. The experts say that at the end of his career, before he vanished, Emmet's playing became truly great.
Review
Following the shapeless agitation of Celebrity, Woody Allen's cogent return to form in Sweet and Lowdown proves that he is fascinated less by celebrity and the noisy now, than by obscurity and the sublime mysteries of the forgotten. Sweet and Lowdown is one of Allen's occasional musings, à la E. L. Doctorow, on the apocryphal corners of modern American history (Zelig, The Purple Rose of Cairo) and another of his studies (Bullets over Broadway, Stardust Memories) of the contradictions between artistic brilliance and moral inadequacy. Apocryphal jazz guitarist Emmet Ray, Allen comments at the start, is "sort of pathetic in a way" but he's indisputably fascinating. He's a vain egotist who walks over people, just like the anti-hero novelist of Deconstructing Harry - except Emmet is worse, in that he has considerable charm and knows how to exploit it. As one character remarks, "No genius is worth too much heartache" - effectively the moral proposition under discussion in Harry.
Sweet and Lowdown is as simple and affecting as the title suggests - a series of anecdotes framed with commentary by jazz experts. But through this structure, Allen examines the difficulty of truly fathoming artists of the past, either through their work or through the stories told about them. The hard evidence about Emmet is in his recordings, while the catalogue of anecdotes about him is open to variation. We get several alternatives for Emmet's pursuit of his wife: Emmet gets hi-jacked by robbers, stages a melodramatic confrontation, or has a chance meeting with the nemesis he holds in awe, Django himself.
All stories are equally valid in this patchwork of fragments, and the Emmet Ray legend becomes all the more concrete the less the gaps are filled in. At one point, the story jumps from a time when Emmet and his mute mistress Hattie are inseparable to Emmet single again. We have to imagine his split with Hattie, an elision that makes their final meeting all the more resonant with the unspoken pain he has done her.
The film, in other words, uses muteness as metaphor, dramatising it in the figure of Hattie, Emmet's child-like, trusting and - everyone keeps assuming - mentally disadvantaged lover. Her intelligence comes into its own in their ambivalent reunion, when she tells Emmet that she is now married with children - all of this conveyed without a word from her. If we take her story at face value, it's sad enough that Emmet has lost his great love; but the outcome is that much richer if we imagine Hattie has invented it. Then it becomes not just a tactful way to reject the lover she knows can only hurt her, but also a gift - Hattie is offering him the heartbreak that makes the virtuoso a truly sublime player.
There's a terrible risk of cliché in this figure of the infinitely supportive mute muse - Hattie could so easily have been a return to Chaplin's eroticised waifs. What brings her alive is Samantha Morton's performance, silent but in its own way entirely musical - a subtle repertoire of reactions, gleeful surges and bursts of erotic fire, and much of it from under a horrible knitted hat. Morton and Penn (playing Emmet) duet astutely, her silences forming a complementary punctuation to his rakish bluster. Penn himself is on top form, portraying the musician not as a standard lovable rascal, but as a thoroughgoing creep, redeemed by his appetite and by the kinetic passion he puts into his music. Even more impressive than the fingering Penn learned for the guitar-playing scenes is the expression on Emmet's face as he plays, the look of a man captivated by his own congress with the sublime.
As you'd imagine from Allen, America's most famous enthusiast for a pre-bebop Eden, Sweet and Lowdown is told with real love for the period, and the film's look is typically flawless; Allen's regular designer Santo Loquasto is teamed here with DoP Zhao Fei (who has worked with both Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige) to create a gently frosted image of the world seen as though through a haze of distant memory. Jazz fans, however, may be aggrieved by Allen's perpetual blind spot: his inability to handle black characters. Black musicians do appear, but only as background figures - Emmet jams with them at a party, then steals a lighter. This might be Allen's incidental comment on white musicians' appropriation of the spark of black jazz, but that, I suspect, would be stretching a point.
Credits
- Director
- Woody Allen
- Producer
- Jean Doumanian
- Screenplay
- Woody Allen
- Director of Photography
- Zhao Fei
- Editor
- Alisa Lepselter
- Production Designer
- Santo Loquasto
- Music Arranger/ Conductor
- Dick Hyman
- ©Magnolia Productions, Inc/Sweetland Films, B.V.
- Production Company
- A Jean Doumanian production
- Executive Producer
- J.E. Beaucaire
- Co-executive Producers
- Jack Rollins
- Charles H. Joffe
- Letty Aronson
- Co-producer
- Richard Brick
- Production Co-ordinator
- Kimberly N. Fajen
- Unit Production Managers
- Margo Myers
- Richard Brick
- Location Manager
- Drew Dillard
- Post-production Co-ordinator
- Katherine Belsey
- Assistant Directors
- Richard Patrick
- Lisa Janowski
- Brian York
- Script Supervisor
- Kay Chapin
- Casting
- Juliet Taylor
- Laura Rosenthal
- Associate:
- Patricia Kerrigan
- Camera Operator
- Michael Green
- Visual Effects Supervisor
- Tom Rosseter
- Visual Effects Producer
- Camille Geier
- Digital Artist
- Scott Roscoe David
- Special Effects Co-ordinators
- John Ottesen
- Ron Ottesen
- Graphics/Research
- Glenn Lloyd
- Sign Designer
- Mark Bachman
- Art Director
- Tom Warren
- Set Decorator
- Jessica Lanier
- Master Scenic Artist
- James Sorice
- Costume Designer
- Laura Cunningham Bauer
- Wardrobe Supervisors
- Barrett Hong
- Suzanne Pettit
- Make-up
- Rosemarie Zurlo
- Eva Polywka
- Hair
- Milton Buras
- Stephen G. Bishop
- Titles
- Effects House
- Musicians
- Solo Guitar:
- Howard Alden
- Rhythm Guitar:
- Bucky Pizzarelli
- Clarinet:
- Ken Peplowski
- Bass:
- Kelly Friesen
- Drums:
- Ted Sommer
- Additional Players
- Piano:
- Dick Hyman
- Trombone:
- Joel Helleny
- Trumpets:
- Byron Stripling
- Joe Wilder
- Saxophones:
- Jerome Richardson
- Chuck Wilson
- Music Recording Engineer
- Roy B. Yokelson
- Music Recording Supervisor
- Walt Levinsky
- Instructors
- Solo Guitar:
- Howard Alden
- Rhythm Guitar:
- Bucky Pizzarelli
- Drum:
- Ted Sommer
- Soundtrack
- "When Day Is Done", "Avalon", Liszt's "Liebestraum No. 3" - Django Reinhardt; "Clarinet Marmalade" - Ted Lewis' Orchestra; "Speak to Me of Love (Parlez-moi d'amour)", "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles", "Twelfth Street Rag", "Sweet Sue, Just You" - Howard Alden; "Mystery Pacific", "Limehouse Blues", "I'll See You in My Dreams", "Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams (And Dream Your Troubles Away)" - Howard Alden, Bucky Pizzarelli, Kelly Friesen; "Out of Nowhere" - Dick Hyman, Joe Wilder, Kelly Friesen; "Sweet Georgia Brown", - Howard Alden, James Chirillo, Kelly Friesen, Ken Peplowski, Ted Sommer, "After You've Gone" - Joe Venuti, Eddie Lang, "Viper Mad" - Sidney Bechet; "Indiana (Back Home Again)" - Red Nichols; "Aloha Oe" - Dick Monday; "Abide by Me" - Mary Stout; "All of Me" - Carol Woods, Howard Alden, Buck Pizzarelli, Kelly Friesen, Ken Peplowski, Ted Sommer; "Caravan" - Bunny Berigan and His Orchestra; "Old Fashioned Love", "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)", "3:00 AM Blues" - Howard Alden, Kelly Friesen, Joel Helleny, Dick Hyman, Ken Peplowski, Jerome Richardson, Ted Sommer, Byron Stripling, Joe Wilder, Chuck Wilson, "Just a Gigolo", "Shine", "There'll Be Some Changes Made", "The Peanut Vendor", "UnfaithfulWoman" - Howard Alden, Bucky Pizzarelli, Kelly Friesen, Ken Peplowski, Ted Sommer; "Nevertheless (I'm in Love with You)" - Ambrose and His Orchestra; "Since My Best Gal Turned Me Down" - Bix Beiderbecke; "Hot Lips" - Henry Busse and His Orchestra; "Lulu's Back in Town" - Dick Hyman, Kelly Friesen, Ted Sommer
- Recordist
- Frank J. Graziadei
- Production Sound Mixer
- Les Lazarowitz
- Re-recording Mixer
- Lee Dichter
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Robert Hein
- Dialogue Editor
- Sylvia Menno
- Sound Effects Editor
- Glenfield Payne
- Foley
- Artists:
- Jay Peck
- Marko Costanzo
- Recording Engineer:
- George Lara
- Editors:
- Frank Kern
- Bruce Pross
- Stunt Co-ordinator
- Peter Bucossi
- Animals
- Dawn Animal Agency
- Cast
- Anthony LaPaglia
- Al Torrio
- Brian Markinson
- Bill Shields
- Gretchen Mol
- Ellie
- Samantha Morton
- Hattie
- Sean Penn
- Emmet Ray
- Uma Thurman
- Blanche
- James Urbaniak
- Harry
- John Waters
- Mr Haynes
- Tony Darrow
- Ben
- Brad Garrett
- Joe Bedloe
- Vincent Guastaferro
- Sid Bishop
- Denis O'Hare
- Jake
- Molly Price
- Ann
- Kaili Vernoff
- Gracie
- Woody Allen
- Ben Duncan
- themselves
- Daniel Okrent
- A.J. Pickman
- Dan Moran
- boss
- Chris Bauer
- Ace, pool player
- Constance Shulman
- Hazel, hooker 1
- Kellie Overbey
- Iris, hooker 2
- Darryl Alan Reed
- Don
- Mark Damon Johnson
- Omer
- Ron Cephas Jones
- Alvin
- Steve Bargonetti
- Benjamin Franklin Brown
- musician friends
- Vince Giordano
- ball player 1
- Emme Kemp
- Clark Gayton
- Marcus McLaurine
- jam session musicians
- Carolyn Saxon
- Phyliss
- Drummond Erskine
- Joe Ambrose
- hobos
- Joe Rigano
- stagehand
- Dennis Stein
- Dick Ruth, club owner
- Nat Hentoff
- himself
- Katie Hamill
- Mary
- Carole Bayeux
- Rita, opium party hostess
- Paula Parrish
- Cory Solar
- Lexi Egz
- Yvette Mercedes
- Peter Leung
- party guests
- William Addy
- master of ceremonies
- Dick Monday
- Chester Weems
- Mary Stout
- Felicity Thomson, amateur singer
- Dick Mingalone
- birdman
- Mr. Spoons
- spoon player
- Carol Woods
- Helen Minton
- Josh Mowery
- movie director
- Fred Goehner
- William Weston
- Eddy Davis
- bass player 2
- Ralph Pope
- panhandler
- Douglas McGrath
- himself
- Jerome Richardson
- Earl P. McIntyre
- James Williams
- Frank Wellington Wess
- Al Bryant
- club musicians
- Ray Garvey
- club manager
- Sally Placksin
- Sally Jillian
- Lola Pashalinski
- Blanche's friend
- Simon Wettenhall
- Orange Kellin
- Brooks Giles III
- jam session musicians
- Alfred Sauchelli Jr
- Ned, pool player
- Michael Bolus
- Lynch, bar room friend
- Mick O'Rourke
- John P. McLaughlin
- holdup men
- Chuck Lewkowicz
- police officer
- Rick Mowat
- flat tire man
- Ted Wilkins
- gas station proprietor
- Michael Sprague
- Django Reinhardt
- Certificate
- PG
- Distributor
- Columbia Tristar Films (UK)
- 8,585 feet
- 95 minutes 23 seconds
- DolbySR
- Colour by
- DuArt
- Prints by
- Technicolor