Sweet and Lowdown: 1999, dir. Woody Allen. Seen on DVD (April 14).
Do I have to write anything about Sweet and Lowdown other than to say that I didn’t like this movie at all, it was a real disappointment, and a huge waste of my time?
Okay. I’ll be brief.
Once upon a time, I liked Woody Allen films. But after seeing Hollywood Ending, I gave up. Then I heard he had made some small, entertaining films like he had done back in the day of Take the Money and Run, and that Sweet and Lowdown was an entertaining film along those lines.
I was misinformed. I wanted a nifty light-hearted mock documentary/crime movie and I got a real mess instead, full of the kind of crap that gives Woody Allen movies a bad name.
The main character is entirely unsympathetic and downright unpleasant to watch. Sean Penn does a great job of portraying a real asshole. I can’t fault Mr. Penn’s acting here, I have the feeling this is just as the director wanted it. Some of his quirks were amusing, like his habit of going to the dump to shoot rats with his dates, and I did like watching him play the guitar. (I assume it was a quite convincing fake.) But for the most part, I didn’t care what happened to this character—he gave me no compelling reason to keep watching.
None of the other characters were remotely appealing or interesting except Samantha Morton, who plays a mute woman in such an expressive and poignant way that we can’t help liking her. Uma Thurman was miscast in a dreadful role as a pseudo-intellectual pseudo-writer. Seeing Douglas McGrath briefly only made me wish I were watching Emma instead (which he wrote/directed), and reminded me that the last good Woody Allen film I’d seen had been Bullets over Broadway (cowritten by McGrath).
And it was that same old Woody Allen storyline. Sean Penn’s character is the second-best jazz guitarist in the world, but he’s a creep and a jerk and he refuses to form any kind of emotional attachments. He ditches his sweet loving mute girlfriend (Morton), whom he took entirely for granted, and marries Thurman’s character on a whim. Eventually he tries to go back to his old girlfriend, but she’s moved on and married someone else, and he realizes how much he cared for her and how much he’s lost by leaving her. And then, of course, he lets his emotion in his music and becomes the best jazz guitarist in the world.
The mock-documentary format does nothing for the movie except allow Woody Allen to jump around with the narrative and skip over less interesting periods of time. At one point, several of the talking heads in the documentary tell different versions of the same story, but this only happens once and for no appparent reason other than a quick laugh.
If this is supposed to be a comedy, it’s not very funny. If it’s supposed to teach us a little lesson about life, it’s one we’re sick of hearing from Woody Allen. You can get the same basic story from Manhattan.
Sweet and Lowdown was dull, generally unfunny, and almost painful to sit through in its entirely. Fortunately it’s not that long a movie.
The one great thing about Sweet and Lowdown is the soundtrack. The jazz guitar music is lovely. Go buy the soundtrack. Forget the movie.
And don’t any of you try to talk me into seeing any more Woody Allen movies. That’s it, buster. I’m not giving him another chance. Don’t tell me that Small Time Crooks is pretty funny, or that I Curse of the Jade Scorpion has a great cast and a Thirties-like atmosphere. Don’t try to sell me on anything else he makes. I saw his movies long after they stopped being entertaining and I should not have to suffer through anything post-Bullets over Broadway. Nope. Not doing it. I mean it this time.