SWEET AND LOWDOWN
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: Take a 95-minute movie. Deduct time
for several musical numbers. Film three endings
for a sub-story (none of them very good). What you
have left is just not enough time to tell anything
more than a superficial morality plot.
Surprisingly popular with the critics, this is a
shallow tale of a fictional legendary jazz
guitarist who ruins his life being totally selfish
and self-obsessed. Allen short-changes us on
character development by taking long timeouts for
musical sequences in an already short film. The
jokes are often weak, the characters mostly one-
dimensional, and only the jazz is up to snuff.
Rating: 4 (0 to 10), low 0 (-4 to +4)
Woody Allen seems to be as popular as ever with the public and with the critics, but I have to say that these days he and I seem to be on very different wavelengths. His last few films seem to me to be superficially written without any real characters. His humor is contrived and weak, and his ideas lack ginger. Allen could have phoned in the script for SWEET AND LOWDOWN. It is little more than an excuse to tie together the musical interludes. In a film already short at 95 minutes, he puts several musical sequences. Then he takes what could have been one of his patented silly situations and works it out three different ways, not one of them amusing. After he wastes that much time he has less plot and character development than a typical hour of television. And what is his theme? If you are not a nice person you might end up cheating yourself. Where is the filmmaker who made LOVE AND DEATH and the intelligent CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS?
Emmet Ray (Sean Penn), as the film opens, is a pimp and a totally selfish personality. Favorite hobbies are watching trains and shooting rats. He happens to be the second best jazz guitarist in the world, second to the great Django Reinhardt. His fictional story is told, in the style REDS, by a combination of dramatizations and by witness interviews by experts on jazz, one of whom is Allen himself.
As if having been given a monstrous talent was not enough Ray is given a perfect girlfriend, Hattie (Samantha Morton). She just sort of falls into his lap as he meets her on the Atlantic City boardwalk. Hattie is a mute laundress and she is beautiful. Hattie is utterly in love with him and transformed by his music. Ray is too selfish and stupid to bring himself to treat her at all well, cheating on her when the opportunity arises and worse insulting her to her face. After living with her about a year he walks out on her in what should be a key scene, but one that Allen seemingly did not bother to film. Instead we learn about it from the witnesses. He has left her for Blanche (Uma Thurman), a writer with a majestic look and an affected mode of speaking. But eventually there is a reckoning.
Allen has cameos for a number of celebrities, some as jazz experts playing themselves, or as with the case of John Waters, just as a character. Penn seems to do Emmet Ray as effortlessly as Ray does jazz guitar. His guitar picking somehow looks right, though he is not credited with any of the music. Much more notable is Samantha Morton as Blanche. Her acting keeps ones eyes focussed on the screen. Screen actors convey most of the plot through their voices. In the vast majority of films, audiences get most of the plot listening to the soundtrack. If one is given the choice of hearing but not seeing or seeing but not hearing a familiar film, one quickly finds that for most films, the former is the more satisfying experience. Silent acting has a different sort of dynamic and really grabs the audience's attention. The result is that Hattie is by orders of magnitude the most compelling character in the film. Morton brings to the role virtues that might have been mundane in the silent era, but which seem memorable in a sound film.
As Allen gets older he seems more and more to be writing about flawed people who have really ruined their personal lives. It would be easy to interpret his characters as any given time as being a commentary on his own behavior. Clint Eastwood does the same sort of thing, but at least his film plots seem to be better developed. SWEET AND LOWDOWN is a superficial morality play that needed considerably more work. I rate it a 4 on the 0 to 10 scale and a low 0 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
Copyright 2000 Mark R. Leeper
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews