Sweet and Lowdown

Sweet and Lowdown has a film style like that of other Woody Allen period pieces set in the 1930s such as Radio Days and Bullets over Broadway. All three films share the same gangster suits, intimate restaurant-clubs and nostalgic Jazz music in the score as well as showing Allen’s passion for Jazz music, for he is a dedicated player of the clarinet and a long time member of a New Orleans Jazz band. He originally wrote the film in the late sixties under the name of The Jazz Baby but the executives at the time wanted more of a comedy from Allen and so he put it on the back-burner and wrote Bananas instead. Thirty years later he rewrote that script and called it Sweet and Lowdown.

In Sweet and Lowdown Allen writes and directs a film following the highs and lows of a fictional Jazz musician called Emmet Ray. Ray played by Sean Penn, is a virtuoso genius on the guitar with an equally impressive tolerance for booze. The film begins talking heads style in that several esteemed aficionados of Ray (including Woody Allen playing himself) are interviewed and retell stories about this Jazzman which then segue into the past and to a roadside bar where we get to see these stories played out firsthand.

Ray is introduced to us not as a legendary Jazzman but as a pool hustler and as a pimp, who being a feebly paid musician, despite his talents needs to make a little dough on the side. He is an egomaniac, never shy of tooting his own horn and so cocky you’d think he’d found some inconspicuous way of concealing his comb, beak and wattle; though this confidence would soon disappear if his idol and only musical superior Django Reinhardt were in the vicinity; for whenever he is so all blood and oxygen are soon drained from Ray’s brain leaving him as an unconscious heap of awe. Throughout the film Reinhardt seems to be sort of an elusive spectre that Ray is trying to both capture and outrun, for not only is he Ray’s hero but he is conversely someone who reminds Ray of his weaknesses.

Due to Ray’s irresponsible and careless nature he is a liability to the clubs he plays at but if you could play the guitar like he does then you’d probably give in to the temptation of taking liberties when you could. He knows that he is the main attraction and that when he plays it is as though all his former disgraces have been forgiven as he manages to hold his audience in the moment. Seeing him play reminded me of the mannerisms of Charlie Chaplin as he sports a dim-witted but charming grin and kicks his legs out with a similar frivolity and slapstick joy. Oddly enough Sweet and Lowdown plays out in the fashion of a Chaplin film as Ray’s second love interest in the film is a sweet, bashful mute who with a societal dysfunction like that of ‘A Blind Girl’ in City Lights seems to be grateful for the attention and that she is being considered at all. Unfortunately for Hattie (the mute played by Samantha Morton) her benefactor is not a lovable, caring, gentile fellow like ‘The Tramp’ but a self-obsessed, emotional infantile musician who has a strange passion for watching trains and shooting rats at the dump; activities he enthusiastically does with reluctant dates. In his first ‘relationship’ of the film he tells the girl “I let my feelings come out in my music,” to which she replies, “Well maybe if you let your feelings out in real life, then your music would be even better.” This fact we eventually discover is the one thing that keeps Ray as an inferior player to Reinhardt of which he is told by his third love interest Blanche played by Uma Thurman. Blanche is a writer who is constantly asking Ray questions, evaluating him and trying to understand how his insides work.

Throughout the film it becomes clear that Ray has trouble dealing with his emotions and rather than sort them out he tries to replace them with the drive to succeed. If he cannot confront and control them he is just as determined not to let them control him and his abilities, but sadly the revelations about what is important to Ray come a little too late leaving him not with just a broken guitar but also a broken heart.

I didn’t think the film played out like you’d expect a story to as it seemed more like fragments of a man’s career both on and off the stage, put together quickly to sum him up. I think it may have been to do with the nature of the film, as like Walk the Line or any other autobiographical film (fictional or not), when you are trying to retell and capture specific moments of a celebrities career it’s going to be difficult to lets say make one event run smoothly into another when editing is needed and so the many relationships the star has with those around them can seem hasty. Although in Sweet and Lowdown it may have been the case that Ray’s romantic relationships were just a tool for understanding Ray better and the kind of man he was rather than the actual details of how they got on or what they did. All in all this is another enjoyable film from Woody Allen and Sean Penn gives a very convincing and amusing performance as an unpredictable, well dressed vagabond.