In newest Allen, not everyone says 'I love you'

A few years before he directed Sweet and Lowdown, Woody Allen and his New Orleans Jazz Band went on a European tour, playing to sellout crowds in Rome, London, and Madrid. In Wild Man Blues, a 1997 documentary about the tour, Allen—who claims to have played the clarinet practically every day of his life since he was 14—talks at length about his love of jazz, especially the early, "primitive," New Orleans style. During an interview segment that makes one think of Radio Days, Allen recalls the good old days of his childhood, when a smart young boy could turn on the radio and hear Billie Holiday scatting or Louis Armstrong playing his trumpet. With a boyish stubbornness he proclaims that, musically, the 1940s were the best decade America has ever seen.

When it comes to choosing the music for his films, Allen occasionally exhibits the same stubbornness, using jazz even when it clashes with the subject matter and atmosphere of a film, as it did in his last film, Celebrity. But in Sweet and Lowdown he has given in to himself, and fitted the matter to the music instead of the other way around.

COURTESY SONY PICTURES Don't know much...but I know I love you. And you're plumb mute.

Sweet and Lowdown narrates, in episodes of varying length, the sad story of the great jazz guitarist Emmet Ray. Ray, who flourished briefly in the '30s before fading into obscurity, was considered by jazz aficionados to be second only to the magnificent gypsy guitarist, Django Rineheardt. Despite Ray's extraordinary talent, very few details are known about his life, and the narrators (Woody Allen and three jazz experts, including famed critic Nat Hentoff) often disagree about what actually took place.

In a wonderful segment, Ray hides in the back of the car as his unfaithful wife goes for a ride with her lover. The adulterous pair stops at a gas station, and here the narrators begin to disagree. We see three versions of what may have followed, each equally outrageous and unlikely, and we must decide for ourselves which version is true.

Actually, none of them is, because Sweet and Lowdown is a biographical picture about a man who never existed. Allen could never have been an Ray fanatic, simply because Ray never lived upon this earth. But through the frequent disagreement between the narrators about important details of his life, he becomes a legendary figure; the question of whether he existed becomes irrelevant. This legend-making process, and the lives of legendary figures, are Allen's two focuses here (a sudden connection arises with the very different Celebrity).

Aside from this, the film tells a moving story, made up of complex characters and a cast that, for the most part, does justice to the script. Sean Penn is Ray, a vain and crude man who still fully understands the extent of his talent—in fact, it's the only thing he understands. Ray, with his severe limitations, must have been a difficult character for Penn to master, but he plays it convincingly and, at times, heart rendingly; he is a man who is struggling, yet unable to express his feelings.

Samantha Morton gives the other noteworthy performance, playing Ray's girlfriend, Hattie. Hattie is a mute halfwit, and because of her silence, Ray is forced to listen to himself. In several remarkable scenes scattered through the movie, all set on the same beachside bench, Hattie's silence and inaction allow Allen to show Ray's slow and partial transformation. All this is, at times, eerily reminiscent of Fellini's La Strada, and its characters Gelsomina and Zampano.

But whereas in La Strada, Zampano could do little besides bursting chains with his pectoral muscles, Emmet Ray can play an amazing jazz guitar. To ghost Ray in the film, Allen hired Howard Alden, a superb jazz guitarist who has done a dozen or more records since the mid-'80s. Some original recordings by Rineheardt also appear in the film. The music is excellent, and it saves some otherwise weak scenes—most notably, an episode in which Ray floats down onto the stage on the poster-mascot crescent moon. Disaster strikes, but it's neither funny nor moving.

For all its small faults (Uma Thurman being the greatest of them), Sweet and Lowdown deserves to be seen for its music, for Penn's and Morton's acting, and even for the idea that the whole film is one big send-up of A&E's Biography. It may not be Allen's best, but I like it better than the "better" ones.

Back to A&E...