|
|
|
|
 |
|||
|
|
||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
| ||||||||||||
|
|
Review by
Gregory Avery
In
Sweet and Lowdown, Woody Allen's best film in years, Sean Penn plays
Emmet Ray, who, a prologue tells us, was the second-greatest jazz guitarist in
the world in the 1930s, next to Django Reinhardt. When Emmet takes the stage to
play, this pugnacious guy, with a swoop of brown hair and a long, thin, mean
little mustache over a thin, mean little smile, suddenly turns lyrical. Seated
in a chair, his legs can't stay still; his body bobs and jounces with the
melody, his face changes to accentuate the notes and shifts of melody that come
out through his supple fingers and the instrument he plays. Off-stage,
he turns out to be a magnificently appalling person, at times. His idea of a
good time is to go down to the dump and shoot rats: he fills with boyish
excitement every time the idea hits him. He also likes to go down and watch
trains. He pockets small objects in people's homes and, walking home through the
meatpacking district in his spotless white suit, takes them out and drops them
by the wayside. When he drinks, or when he doesn't drink, he tells people that
he's the greatest jazz guitarist alive...except for "that Gypsy in
Europe" (Django). Sean Penn gives Emmet a cocky, very masculine swagger, to
compensate for the fact that Emmet is deathly afraid inside. Despite his
bravado, his attempts to pick up women are disastrously clumsy. He
does meet up with Hattie (Samantha Morton), a girl whom he and a friend meet on
the Atlantic City boardwalk. Hattie turns out to be mute ("It's my day off!
I want a talking girl!" Emmet complains), and she does not like to go to
the dump to shoot anything, period. But despite the allusions that she may be
half-witted, Hattie turns out to be anything but. She's more than happy to find
herself a boyfriend, love his music, and eat at the hotels where Emmet performs
with his quintet as if she hadn't had a decent morsel of food in her life. She
lets it be known that she doesn't like Emmet playing around with other women,
but does so in a way which, as a friend of mine would put it, is "assertive
but not aggressive.” Yet she does things like remembering Emmet's birthday,
and he gradually comes to realize that he's crossing the border, here, into new
territory with a woman. Samantha
Morton gives Hattie a great, rubbery smile, which is quite ingratiating, and
great wide eyes. She doesn't utter a sound during the film, but she communicates
what Hattie is thinking and feeling with great precision and clarity. She is
stringently sentimental in her portrayal of her: you get the impression that
this is a girl who has had to survive on her own two feet to quite an extent,
which is why you become loathe to see her hurt. On the other hand, her love for
Emmet is the kind that requires only the simplest but truest obligations, which
is something that Emmet, for better or worse, comes to a full realization of. What
happens to Emmet and Hattie is not disclosed, for a bit, because the film takes
the form of an account of Emmet's life pieced together from interviews with
writers, filmmakers, and jazz experts, who recount what they've learned about
Emmet, what they think might have happened to him, or what they heard,
second-hand, that may or may not be true. Emmet also has some misadventures with
a slinky, Bohemian type named Blanche (Uma Thurman, in her sultry femme fatale
mode), who carries around a notepad and asks shady types questions like,
"What's it like, 'rubbing out' a person?"; some gangsters, played by
Brad Garrett (Raymond's brother in the T.V. series Everyone Loves Raymond)
and Anthony LaPaglia; and a taxi dancer (Gretchen Mol) -- they end up going to
watch the trains, too. The movie has been compared to City Lights, not
only because it concerns a relationship between a rascal (the Tramp was always
anti-authoritarian and anti-establishment) and a handicapped girl. Sweet and
Lowdown starts out as howlingly funny, and ends up on a serious, unresolved
note. Emmet makes a handful of recordings in a studio (Howard Alden supplied the
guitar solos on the soundtrack), including one of his own compositions, and
which, because they're Emmet's only recordings, are referred to by the film's
jazz aficionados as his "last.” Django Reinhardt, on the other hand, made
many recordings over a twenty-year period, playing prolifically despite the loss
of two fingers on one hand; his recordings, today, still play like a dream. Could
Emmet Ray have recorded more of his music, for others to listen to and enjoy? Sweet
and Lowdown suggests that, whether or not we come to care about Emmet as a
person -- and we do end up caring about him -- or no matter how much we may
think we have him all figured out, there are still parts of him that will always
be unknowable. They are his to deal with, alone, and to the great majority it
ends up being of no consequence or concern. Whatever did or did not happen to
Emmet Ray, as one of the film's commentators puts it, "we," meaning
the great, grey, callous bulk of posterity, "fortunately, have these last
recordings, and they're absolutely beautiful.” Contents | Features | Reviews
| Books | Archives | Store |
|
|
