Also fits this series:
“We’ll always have Woody”: A look at Woody Allen films
Subsections below:
A few factors heighten this film’s appealA tour de force of acting fills out the central rogue
Passing details: faces familiar to you, and a location not alien to me
For a modern “Emmet Ray,” check out Clapton’s autobio—not as a focus of comedy
[An adaptation of this entry may
be available in a non-blog form some months from now.]
This film represents something of a sea change for Woody
Allen’s producing team and circumstances, and results in an interesting fact:
With his frequent or constant associates of (especially) Carlo Di Palma as cinematographer, Susan E. Morse as film editor, Santo Loquasto with production design, his films tended (by the mid-1990s)
to have a bit of a distant look—almost like a play being performed on a stage,
which in a sense they were. With his verbiage-heavy scripts and his favoring
master shots to get scenes done—and with his director’s conceptualization of
“mounting” a film (cf. how he described producing Match Point in Eric Lax, Conversations
with Woody Allen [Knopf, 2007], p. 252)—it’s no wonder his films tended to
look (at times) like filmed plays, through about 1997, whether his fans liked
this or not.
In 1996, presumably the year
that Deconstructing Harry was
produced, Allen used Carlo Di Palma for the last time. He used cinematographer Sven
Nykvist for Celebrity (1998) (which
was in black-and-white). Also, Celebrity
was the last film for which he had the services of editor Susan Morse.
By 1999, changes included use of
a new editor, Alisa Lepselter, who would
remain his film editor through today. Also, maybe more noticeably to viewers,
he would start a practice, maybe due to sheer circumstance beyond his full
control, of using a changing series of cinematographers. For 1999’s Sweet and Lowdown, this was Zhao Fei,
who would be with him through three films.
As it happened, though this film
came within the series produced by Jean Doumanian (see my reviews of Bullets Over Broadway on my other blog
and of Mighty Aphrodite on this blog
for some information on her), it marks, perhaps, something of a sea change in
this way: while, from now on, his films are hit or miss, when they hit, they
can have a direct, almost intuitive appeal, and with a feel as if they aren’t a
typical Allen film, compared to the style he set up in the long period
(1986-97) in which he mostly used cinematographer Di Palma.
A few factors heighten this film’s appeal
The visual look of this film is
one thing that makes it unusually appealing, viscerally attractive, for a film
of Allen’s of the 1990s.
Two other factors that
contribute to this include the casual, earthy story—the script is derived from
an old screenplay of Allen’s called The
Jazz Baby (see Lax, p. 128), first done in the early 1970s when Allen was
asked by United Artists for a film to follow Take the Money and Run (1969), and he offered the not-load-of-jokes
Jazz Baby—which, as it happened,
shocked the execs at UA, who expected another comic romp from him. Instead, he
amenably wrote Bananas (Lax p. 336).
Though he reworked the old Jazz Baby script for production in presumably
1998, this story, it seems to me, has hallmarks of his early-1970s work, a sort
of peripatetic nature and casual, “hip” quality that may remind us of Bananas (1971) and Sleeper (1973). Actually, this quality coheres with what I think is
a fault of this film, too, that the story seems to wander after a while, which
is one flaw highlighted in such a review as Leonard Maltin’s.
To put it another way: this film
seems to succeed in terms of conveying an unadulterated enthusiasm for a kind
of music and the time in which it was in ferment, and there are lots of nice
little ideas (for specific exchanges, or vignettes), but the eventual drift of
the story doesn’t make it quite as successful as Zelig or Broadway Danny Rose,
with which (in Allen’s oeuvre) it could easily be compared.
A tour de force of acting fills out the central rogue
The last factor that makes this
film appeal coheres with the fact that, wandering or not, it offers a character
study, and this is immeasurably aided by the performance of Sean Penn as
jazz guitarist Emmet Ray, for which he won an Oscar in a leading role for the
1999 season. In fact, Sean’s performance is the one thing that makes us
consistently come back to this film for another look, along with the tasty
period-piece details.
Penn is like Jack Nicholson, whose grasp of the acting craft is shown in his (Nicholson’s) remarking
in DVD comments for the Nancy Meyers-directed Something’s Gotta Give (2003) that, not meant to be a trivial truism,
film is an art form centered on motion. Given the factor of motion, a good
actor fills each moment with something of interest. And Penn, for his part,
knows this. No matter how slovenly a character Emmet Ray is, and no matter how
homely Penn himself may seem, what grips our attention is Penn’s way of giving
his character life at every moment. There is no dull spell where he is just standing
disengaged.
Whether there was a real jazz
guitarist named Emmet Ray is unclear. The film departs from Allen’s usual
initial-titles style by including printed titles, before anything else, limited
to conveying supposed facts about Ray, as if he had been real. Google doesn’t
seem able to say whether Ray was real, but that may not mean he wasn’t. Allen,
partly as if to give the film a trademark touch, turns up as the first of
several talking heads (à la Zelig
[1983]), and with his own comments starting rather banal, he speaks as if Ray
was one of the greatest guitarists of his time (as well as being a “funny”
character)—while the very best jazz guitarist is Django Reinhardt. The latter, definitely a real person, is
importantly alluded to in this film (as a sort-of-competitor and idol for Ray),
including in a supposed appearance in an anecdote (though this, per the film’s
own fictional conceits, may have been apocryphal). The talking heads even
include Nat Hentoff, who was profiled in a
New York Times article in late June
of this year. Such a touch seems to convey Ray was real. But was he?
It may not matter, because the
character study that is the film—of flaws, foibles, career stumbles, and all—seems
worthwhile for savoring in its own right. Ray appears to have been a cad in
most ways—he was a kleptomaniac, he was financially irresponsible, and he was
terrible with women, making this latter point clear in no unsubtle way (with
remarks like [or similar to] “I love ’em and leave ’em”). His treatment of the
mute girlfriend Hattie, played by Samantha Morton,
in the one other lengthy and laudable performance in this film, is so reprehensible
late in their association that we would feel bad for her no matter how
unredeeming she might strike us in other ways.
But Penn makes Ray interesting
to see in action—not least for his performance on his catch-as-catch-can times
on stage, where Ray seems most reliably to prove himself a worthwhile human
being (if only in that intermittent way). Penn, as I’ve suggested, is so
interesting an actor to watch that he could probably make a gripping thespian
exercise out of sitting on a toilet. We follow where his Ray is headed even as
the film’s story starts to ramble.
As it happens, it is finally
some narrated “telling not showing” by Allen and another commenter that relates
that, in some remote, vaguely documented reaches of the 1930s, Ray finally got
to be, if only briefly, as good as Django Reinhardt—though this coincided with
a suggested downturn in his life, and hence it’s possible Ray only ascended to
this level in proportion to his personal suffering’s increased, which is a
correlation not uncommon among artists.
Passing details: faces familiar to you, and a location not alien to me
Actors in bit parts: A
series of familiar faces pass through in this film, including as a sort of
shady manager or such Anthony LaPaglia,
who would turn up as a TV actor playing a Mafioso named Little Caesar in Analyze That (2002). (As I said
regarding Bullets Over Broadway,
actors in minor parts who would later feature in Mafia works through the
mid-2000s—including Analyze This
[1999] and cable TV’s The Sopranos—pass
through Allen’s films of this period, including a few—playing gym workers—in Mighty Aphrodite.)
John Waters, the film director of shock works like Pink Flamingos (1972), turns up briefly
in Sweet and Lowdown as a manager of sorts for Ray.
A bit of trivia on a location:
I thought this film was set in the New York City area, though the Wikipedia
article on it says the fictional setting was Chicago and California (while Lax,
p. 207, notes the additional fictional locales of New York and Atlantic City);
of course, given Allen’s likely production parameters, the film was shot in New
York and New Jersey. But one ironic outcome of its relatively confined shooting
location is this: In a situation where Emmet, after having undergone a bender
involving use of some smokable drug, ends up in a camping-like area, and needs
a taxi to get home (which seems to end up costing him about $900), he orients
himself to location in his bedroom by picking up a brochure and reading “East
Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania,” or “Stroudsburg” (mentioned later). These two towns,
in fact (yes, there is an East Stroudsburg and another without the “East”), are
on the eastern edge of Pennsylvania, toward the north, and a little over an
hour from where I live, and I’ve been there. And there are resort amenities
there.
I had originally thought Emmet
had been transported to East Stroudsburg after a night of partying “too hard”
in the New York
##
For a modern “Emmet Ray,” check out Clapton’s autobio—not as a focus of
comedy
This film features some played
guitar music, and it’s nice for this. Penn even pretends to play guitar along
with pre-recorded music, and is better at faking this than many actors are.
Having played a guitar for 30+ years (1977-2009) myself (I reserve further
comment on this—I’m like a lot of us in this way: there are many who play a
guitar only passably, not great), I can say Penn looks pretty good here, but
you can tell he’s faking it when the particular patch of music you hear would
be further up on the guitar neck than where his fingers are. And also, with
some figures you hear played, his fingering is, temporarily, not quite right.
But these are minor quibbles: the music offered in the film (some is played on
an acoustic guitar amplified with a specially inserted “pickup,” though in the
film the acoustic guitar is shown unamplified) is fine to listen to.
For a book on a great guitarist
that has its own charms despite the occasionally dissolute nature of his life,
check out Clapton: The Autobiography
by blues-rock guitarist Eric Clapton (Broadway Books, 2007). Of the three great
electric guitarists who came out of the 1960s group the Yardbirds—the others are
Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck—Clapton has been most the blues purist.
In his autobio, in accessible
enough prose (that he wrote himself), Clapton recounts his life, not dwelling
on anything in too much detail, with chapters segmented according to the phases
of his career rock fans know so well: his participation in the groups John
Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, the Yardbirds, Cream, and Blind Faith; and his solo
years, including his somewhat lengthy period in the early 1970s of having been
(allegedly) idle due to addiction issues. I read this book a few years ago,
everything except the final chapter or so, which is on his most recent life.
The reason for my not finishing
was at least partly the general nature of this book: like many recovering
addicts, Clapton has a way of making his life seem the way Garry Wills has described
St. Augustine with respect to the latter’s Confessions
(or Testimony as Wills offered as a
new title in a book Wills wrote on that ancient text): the story is more
interesting when the addict is suffering, and becomes distinctly less
interesting when the person has found God, or whatever other level on which he
has obtained a relief from his addiction based on a profound altering of
personality and priorities. I was struck by how, as he recounts it, in his
addiction years Clapton seemed to be a failure in just about every way except
in his guitar playing, which latter condition, of course, is how his fans
primarily knew him at the height of his fame in the 1960s and 1970s. Even his close
romantic attachments were ruined by his addictions (to drugs and alcohol). I
wouldn’t want to strongly second-guess his reading of himself, but I’ve
wondered if he isn’t a little hard on himself regarding his addiction years.
In any event, when Clapton gets
to his most recent, “recovered” life, his talk about himself and his life
struck me as about as exciting as watching an old man use a table saw. He may
be content and able to raise a young child in a stable home post-recovery, but
as an artist—at least as his autobio
reflects—he seems to have gotten well past his peak. I liked his playing at the
12-12-12 concert in December 2012—it was among the very few “really rocking”
moments in what I saw in that on TV. Now I hear he’s planning to retire,
apparently in part because of physical ailments. That’s his prerogative, and we
have his old recordings to enjoy from when he was at his peak.
