Emmet's inferiority complex to Reinhardt is used as one of several running gags throughout the film. While these, and the numerous clever asides worked into the script, are deftly handled, they just aren't very funny. As a comedy Sweet and Lowdown rarely raises more than a faint smile. Which would be fine, only the film fails to register as a drama of any significance either. Some of the reason for this is that the plot has no real direction, some of it has to do with the one-dimensional and uninteresting characters. Emmet is a boorish and selfish egotist. Talented as he is, I think Sean Penn may have been the wrong person to play him, because while he does a good job of bringing out Emmet's worst qualities as a human being, he fails in the vital aspect of making him charming. It's tough to care what happens to a character when he has no endearing qualities whatsoever.

Scenes come and go with no real purpose. You could take almost any one of them out and the film wouldn't lose anything. With all the interesting situations that a man like Emmet could find himself in, about the most eventful thing that happens is his clumsily attempted - and clumsily filmed - experiment with stage theatrics. There are also a lot of segues into musical pieces to pad the film out, which to anyone not a jazz guitar aficionado will probably sound dated and dull. Penn's ungainly fingering also makes it all too obvious that he's only mimicking the playing.

Much of the film is spent on Emmet's romance of Hattie, a mute girl played by Samantha Morton. Hattie is merely a cipher, when she is not looking up at Emmet and smiling, she'll be turning away from him and frowning. The scenes between the two grow increasingly annoying, most merely consisting of Emmet rabbiting on about nonsense with Hattie looking blankly back. Why Hattie wanted to be with Emmet in the first place remains a mystery, why she stays with him even more so. It's can't be his music as some would say, she slept with him before she had even heard him play. There's actually something insidious about this unpleasant man preying on an innocent half-wit. I can't imagine what Allen was trying to achieve. We aren't even shown what should have been a crucial scene, Emmet leaving Hattie, we're merely told that it has happened.

The film does pick up slightly during Emmet's marriage to Blanche, if only because there is finally someone other than Emmet talking. Blanche, played with grace by Uma Thurman, is an Anais Nin wannabe, using Emmet as the extreme character she seeks to be her muse. This is used to comic effect in several scenes, but she is gone almost as soon as she has arrived, cheating on Emmet with her new muse, a gangster played by Anthony LaPaglia.

After a failed attempt to get back together with Hattie, the final scene of the movie sees Emmet left pining over his mistakes. He finally lets his feelings out in real life and not just in his music, which Blanche had suggested would actually improve his music. It seems she was right, the film closes with Emmet playing perhaps the most beautiful piece of music in the film. We are also told that his subsequent recordings were the best of his career, finally raising him to the level of Django Reinhardt.

So at the final curtain we are left with perhaps a little meaning in the film, but I'm afraid the journey we had to take to get there just wasn't nearly compelling enough. Sweet and Lowdown is really not as terrible a movie as this review might make it sound, it's actually quite pleasant, and looks fantastic. Ultimately however it's an insubstantial and utterly forgettable trifle.

Uma's Performance

Uma has a pretty brief appearance time-wise in this film, making her first arrival sixty minutes into the film, and leaving just twenty minutes later. The time she's there is certainly worthwhile though, on a mildly entertaining level anyway, it's not one of her most probing character studies. As mentioned in the review Allen just didn't seem interested in taking anything but a cursroy examination of his characters and so the script offers Uma few favors.

It's a bright and breezy performance. She quite rightly decides to make Blanche a likeable character, even though her writerly aspirations could easily have led her to be a stuck-up and pretentious bitch. Instead Uma gives us a character who's passion for writing and for people, despite the fact that she isn't much good with either, leads her to follow some rather wayward and impractical paths at times. "I'd like to be a whore for a year, just a year," she says at one point, thinking only of the story she will write with her experiences and not the unsavory consequences of such a profession.

So yes, a very classy, very stylish show. She manages to bring an uncommon grace to an activity as base as shooting rats in a garbage dump, which creates an oddly alluring image. She also has a couple of wonderful comic moments; one particularly worthy of mention is when she tries to figure out Emmet's fascination for trains. "You sound like you want to make love to a train", is Emmet's deadpan response to her wildly off-track gestations.

I guess the quite reasonable desire to work with Woody Allen and Sean Penn prompted Uma to take a part in this film. Contrary to my fairly negative review of it here, Sweet and Lowdown was actually quite well received by a lot of critics, and proved to be a perfectly adequate piece of filler to cushion out Uma's career during a busy period in her private life. That being her marriage to Ethan Hawke and the birth of her daughter.

Quotes about the movie

Uma Thurman: "Sony Classics brought it without having seen it. That's how it works with Woody. He's very secretive. The actors get to see only the part of the script that you are in. He tells you as much as he thinks you ought to know. He supposedly never says much, but he talked a lot to me. When it is finished, the distributor has to buy it without having seen it. It's the only thing in show business in which there is actually no way to hedge your bets."

Woody Allen: "Uma is a wonderful actress - gorgeous, sophisticated, with the quality of an exceptionally imposing aristocrat."

Downloads

Sweet and Lowdown Multimedia Page

Offsite Links

Sony's Official Sweet and Lowdown Website

A Woody Allen Page: Sweet and Lowdown Lot's of info.

Rotten-Tomatoes: Sweet and Lowdown Collection of reviews and other info on the film. Really good site.

Sweet and Lowdown: Production Notes At Yahoo.com

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