Sweet and Lowdown (1999)
Film Overview
A fictional documentary remembers Emmet Ray, a brilliant 1930s jazz guitarist whose extraordinary musical talent is matched only by his vanity, irresponsibility and terror of standing in the shadow of Django Reinhardt.
Sean Penn plays Emmet, a musician regarded by admirers as perhaps the second greatest jazz guitarist in the world. Emmet himself would probably agree, although being second to Django Reinhardt remains a permanent wound to his pride.
The film is presented through documentary-style interviews in which Woody Allen and other commentators tell stories about Emmet’s life, often admitting that the details have become contradictory or impossible to verify.
Samantha Morton plays Hattie, a shy young woman who cannot speak and becomes Emmet’s most important relationship. He is attracted to her warmth and devotion but repeatedly fails to treat her with the care she deserves.
Uma Thurman later appears as Blanche, a sophisticated aspiring writer fascinated by Emmet’s stories and personality. Gretchen Mol plays Ellie, while Anthony LaPaglia appears as gangster Al Torrio.
The film’s guitar performances were created with major contributions from jazz guitarist Howard Alden, who also coached Penn. Zhao Fei photographs the period world in warm colour, beginning a new cinematographic collaboration with Allen.
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My Review
A beautiful sound from a very difficult man
Sweet and Lowdown is one of Woody Allen’s most affectionate films about music and one of his least sentimental films about musicians. Emmet Ray can play the guitar beautifully. Almost everything else about him is considerably harder to admire.
Sean Penn understands the contradiction immediately. Emmet carries himself like a man who has already decided his talent excuses whatever happens around it. He drinks, lies, disappears, wastes money and treats women badly, all while maintaining the absolute confidence of somebody who knows that the moment he picks up a guitar people will forgive a great deal.
The film never questions the talent. That is important. If Emmet were merely another deluded performer, the story would be easy. He really is exceptional. Other musicians recognise it, audiences recognise it and even the documentary commentators discussing him decades later remain fascinated by what he could do.
The uncomfortable question is what, if anything, artistic greatness obliges us to forgive in the person producing it.
Emmet Ray’s tragedy is that the guitar confirms everything he believes about his own importance.
His obsession with Django Reinhardt is one of the film’s funniest ideas and also the key to understanding him. Emmet can tolerate being brilliant. What he cannot tolerate is knowing somebody else may be better.
Django exists throughout the story almost like a supernatural presence. Emmet talks about him constantly, measures himself against him and reportedly reacts with overwhelming emotion when the great guitarist appears.
There is something almost touching about the insecurity. Emmet’s entire identity depends on musical superiority, yet he has personally decided there is one man he cannot surpass. His hero therefore becomes the person whose existence most threatens him.
Allen understands the strange mixture of admiration and jealousy that can exist between artists. Emmet does not want Django diminished. He wants the impossible privilege of worshipping him without having to be second.
Django Reinhardt is the musician Emmet loves most and the proof that Emmet’s favourite story about himself can never be completely true.
Samantha Morton’s Hattie changes the film. She cannot speak, which initially seems to place her at an enormous disadvantage beside a man who never stops performing himself. In practice, Hattie becomes one of the most emotionally articulate people in the story.
Morton communicates through expression, gesture and attention. Hattie’s silence is never treated as emptiness. She watches Emmet more clearly than almost anybody because she is not constantly competing with him for control of the conversation.
Emmet likes her partly because her silence allows him to dominate. What he fails to understand is that being unable to speak does not mean being unable to judge. Hattie sees exactly what he is.
She also loves him, which makes the relationship much more painful. Emmet receives a form of devotion he has done very little to earn and mistakes receiving love for knowing how to return it.
Hattie says nothing and understands Emmet better than almost everyone who spends the film talking about him.
Their scenes together contain much of the film’s warmth. There is an innocence to Hattie that Emmet enjoys without respecting enough. He can be funny with her, relaxed with her and genuinely affectionate. Those qualities make his eventual treatment of her worse rather than easier to dismiss.
Allen refuses the familiar idea that love automatically reforms a difficult man. Hattie gives Emmet the opportunity to behave better. That is not the same thing as possessing the character required to take the opportunity.
Emmet wants admiration, excitement and freedom more consistently than he wants responsibility. Hattie eventually has to build a life beyond him because waiting for talent to become kindness is not a reliable plan.
When Emmet later tries to return, time has done what he failed to do: it has moved on.
Hattie cannot love Emmet into becoming a better man. Eventually she has to become a person whose future no longer depends on whether he changes.
Uma Thurman’s Blanche initially seems almost designed to suit the image Emmet has of himself. She is sophisticated, educated and fascinated by the colourful stories surrounding this supposedly legendary jazz figure.
Blanche wants to write, which introduces another form of storytelling into a film already presented as unreliable biography. She listens to Emmet’s anecdotes and records the mythology surrounding him.
That is a dangerous thing to do with a man who has spent years constructing his own legend. Emmet is happy to be studied as long as the version produced is flattering.
Their marriage inevitably proves unable to survive on fascination alone. Blanche eventually becomes involved elsewhere, and Emmet discovers that being the central character in somebody’s notebook does not guarantee being the central character in their emotional life.
The mock-documentary structure is one of the film’s smartest choices. Woody Allen, Nat Hentoff and others appear as commentators attempting to piece together the life of a musician who never existed.
Their stories occasionally contradict one another. Some episodes sound plausible, others have clearly become exaggerated through years of repetition. Emmet is gradually turned into the sort of jazz legend whose biography belongs partly to fact and partly to the stories musicians tell after midnight.
That frees Allen from conventional biography while still allowing him to imitate its pleasures. We are not watching the definitive truth about Emmet Ray. We are watching the version that survived.
It is especially appropriate for jazz, an art form where variation and improvisation are built into the music itself.
Emmet Ray never existed, yet by the end the conflicting stories about him make him feel exactly like the sort of musician people would still argue about decades later.
The music is obviously central, and the film takes it seriously. Howard Alden supplied Emmet’s solo guitar playing and helped Sean Penn make the physical performance convincing. Bucky Pizzarelli and other musicians contribute to an exceptionally rich recreation of 1930s jazz.
Django Reinhardt himself is heard on the soundtrack, which is essential. Emmet cannot spend the entire film describing an unreachable musical ideal without allowing us to hear something of the real musician inspiring the obsession.
Sweet Georgia Brown, Avalon, After You’ve Gone, Caravan and other standards make the film feel less like a conventional score than a world in which musicians are constantly playing somewhere nearby.
The guitar is also where Emmet becomes most honest. He may lie about money, women and his own importance, but once he plays there is much less room to pretend.
Emmet spends his life inventing stories about himself. The guitar is the one place where he does not need the story.
Zhao Fei’s photography gives the film a warmth that suits both the period and the musical subject. The nightclubs, roads, train yards, amusement park and modest rooms never feel artificially polished.
Allen discovered Zhao through his work in Chinese cinema, and Sweet and Lowdown begins a collaboration that immediately looks different from the cool black-and-white severity of Celebrity.
Santo Loquasto again has the challenge of recreating an earlier America without allowing the design to become the subject of every scene. Rye Playland, Haverstraw, Nyack, Queens and New Jersey locations are transformed into the wider geography of Emmet’s wandering career.
The production reportedly used dozens of period-dressed locations, and that abundance matters. Emmet never seems settled because the film itself is always moving towards another club, another job or another town.
Sean Penn received an Oscar nomination, and it is easy to see why. Emmet could have become unbearable very quickly. Penn finds enough vulnerability underneath the arrogance to make us understand why people remain fascinated by him.
He is particularly good whenever Django is mentioned. The swagger disappears and something much younger seems to emerge. For a moment, Emmet stops being the musician who expects everybody to admire him and becomes the listener overwhelmed by somebody else’s gift.
Samantha Morton deserved her Supporting Actress nomination just as much. Hattie has no conventional dialogue, yet she gives the film its emotional memory. Long after many of Emmet’s louder relationships have disappeared, she remains the one absence he cannot simply fill with another story.
Their performances create the title’s balance perfectly: the sweetness and the lowdown.
Emmet’s music explains why people remember him. Hattie explains why remembering him is not the same thing as forgiving him.
The later encounter with Hattie is devastating precisely because Allen does not overplay it. Emmet discovers that the person he treated as though she would always be available has continued living without him.
There is no grand punishment. He has not lost his musical ability. Audiences have not turned against him. The consequence is much simpler: something good existed in his life and he failed to recognise its value until it belonged to the past.
That emotional recognition feeds back into the music. The legend says Emmet subsequently made one of his greatest recordings. Pain becomes art, which sounds romantic until you remember the pain involved another person who had to live through it.
Sweet and Lowdown never resolves that contradiction. I am glad it does not. Great art can emerge from flawed people without turning the flaws into virtues.
Emmet finally produces something beautiful from regret. The beauty does not cancel what gave him the regret.
For me, that is the strength of the film. Allen clearly loves the jazz, the musicians, the mythology and the world they inhabit, but he does not turn his fictional genius into a saint simply because the guitar sounds magnificent.
The documentary form even allows Emmet to become larger after death. Stories improve, memories blur and an irresponsible working musician gradually becomes a legendary figure discussed by historians.
Yet Hattie remains outside that mythology. Her relationship with Emmet gives us access to the ordinary human cost hidden behind the legend.
Emmet Ray may only be the second greatest guitarist in the world. Sweet and Lowdown understands that being first would not have solved the things that were actually wrong with him.
Cast and Characters
Sean Penn
A fictional 1930s jazz guitarist of extraordinary ability whose talent, vanity and irresponsibility continually pull his life in opposite directions.
Samantha Morton
A quiet young woman unable to speak whose love for Emmet becomes the most emotionally important relationship of his life.
Uma Thurman
A sophisticated aspiring writer whose fascination with Emmet’s colourful stories eventually becomes marriage.
Anthony LaPaglia
A gangster who belongs to the dangerous nightlife world surrounding Emmet’s wandering career.
Gretchen Mol
One of the women passing through Emmet’s complicated personal life as his career continues moving from club to club.
Woody Allen
Allen appears as himself among the documentary-style commentators attempting to reconstruct the contradictory legend of Emmet Ray.
The guitar is the one thing about Emmet that never needs exaggerating
Howard Alden provides Emmet Ray’s solo guitar performances, joined by Bucky Pizzarelli and an ensemble of accomplished jazz musicians, while genuine recordings by Django Reinhardt and other period artists establish the musical world Emmet desperately wants to dominate.
Sweet Georgia Brown
Howard Alden leads the performance of the jazz standard with James Chirillo, Kelly Friesen, Ken Peplowski, Bucky Pizzarelli and Ted Sommer. The music gives the fictional Emmet the musical credibility the entire story depends upon.
The real guitarist haunting the fictional one
Genuine Django Reinhardt recordings sit beside the performances created for Emmet Ray, ensuring the guitarist he worships is more than a name repeatedly mentioned in dialogue.
Dick Hyman arranged and conducted additional music, while Howard Alden also coached Sean Penn so that Emmet’s physical relationship with the guitar would remain convincing on screen.
Avalon
Reinhardt’s genuine recording gives the audience direct access to the musical genius against whom Emmet measures himself throughout the film.
After You’ve Gone
The classic recording expands the soundtrack beyond guitar alone and into the broader jazz culture surrounding Emmet’s career.
I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles
Alden performs the number in an arrangement that helps transform the fictional Emmet Ray into a musician who sounds entirely plausible within the period.
Caravan
The Duke Ellington, Irving Mills and Juan Tizol standard brings another defining jazz voice into one of Allen’s most music-centred films.
Locations
Although Emmet’s fictional career carries him across America, Sweet and Lowdown was filmed in New York and New Jersey, using dozens of period-dressed locations to create the wandering jazz world of the 1930s.
Rye Playland
The historic amusement park, beach and boardwalk provide some of the film’s most memorable outdoor period locations connected to Hattie.
Fresh Pond Rail Yard
The rail yard becomes one of Emmet’s recurring environments, perfectly suited to a musician whose life always seems to be moving somewhere else.
Haverstraw
Haverstraw supplied a number of period street and exterior locations for the production.
Nyack
Nyack was another of the New York locations redressed to suggest the wider American geography of Emmet’s career.
Teaneck Armory
The vast armory was used as a temporary soundstage for specially constructed interiors and the film’s documentary-style material.
A Period America Near Manhattan
The production transformed locations around New York and New Jersey into Chicago, New Jersey, the road and even Hollywood without needing to take the shoot far from Manhattan.
Awards and Recognition
Sean Penn Nomination
Penn received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for his performance as Emmet Ray.
Samantha Morton Nomination
Morton received a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her largely non-verbal performance as Hattie.
Sean Penn Nomination
Penn was nominated for Best Actor in a Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy.
Samantha Morton Nomination
Morton also received a Golden Globe nomination for Supporting Actress.
A New Cinematography Partnership
The film marked Allen’s first feature with cinematographer Zhao Fei, whose warm period photography gives the film a distinctive visual identity.
Allen’s Jazz Film
Jazz had appeared throughout Allen’s work for decades, but Sweet and Lowdown places the musician and the music itself at the centre of the story.