Friday, March 10, 2000

'Sweet and Lowdown' a Woody Allen gem

Woody Allen makes the characters in his new film "Sweet and Lowdown" (opening today at Cine 6) so convincing that on the way out of a screening in Los Angeles recently, I overheard two moviegoers discussing stopping by Tower Records to pick up some Emmet Ray CDs. Ray, a '30s jazz guitarist, is the completely fictional central character in the movie, which plays out as a kind of nostalgic documentary incorporating interviews with such real-life music critics as Nat Hentoff.
   Sean Penn earned a well-deserved Best Actor Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Ray, a tough, self-involved little rat of a man whose only soft spots are women and any mention of "gypsy" guitarist Django Reinhardt, whose perfection reduces him to mush. Sporting a pencil-thin moustache, poofy hair and a loud wardrobe of yellow suits and shiny spats, Ray lives on the roads of Depression-era America, picking up gigs wherever he can find them, always dreaming of the hit tune that will shoot him to the moon.
   On a New Jersey boardwalk he meets Hattie (Oscar-nominated Samantha Morton), a mute, moonfaced laundress who eats like a fieldhand and makes herself "heard" with an amazing vocabulary of facial expressions. She falls in love with the slick musician and although he treats her like dirt - making her change tires and wash his clothes because he doesn't want to damage his hands - she remains loyal.
   Then Ray up and marries a rich, tux-wearing socialite (slinky Uma Thurman), a mistake (one more of many) that derails his once-promising career and makes him realize what he's lost by dumping Hattie.
   Segueing through a series of vignettes about Ray's music, romances and how he barely misses meeting his guitar idol in a botched gas station holdup, the movie merrily skips along, underscored with great old jazz and swing songs. (Penn believably mimes the fingering of about 30 tunes.)
   It's good to see the old Woody Allen at work again (he wrote and directed), visiting a period for which he's exhibited great fondness before ("Bullets Over Broadway," "Purple Rose of Cairo"). "Sweet and Lowdown" is everything Allen's last film, "Celebrity," was not. The characters are likable, the storyline is fresh and the performances are absolutely first-rate.
   Penn's never been looser. And who knew he was such a good physical comedian? Morton is to-die-for lovely. And the faded-rose blush in the cinematography of Zhao Fei ("Raise the Red Lantern") gives it all the look of a Jazz Age dream.
  
  

 
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