Django Chained: ‘Sweet and Lowdown’ (1999)

You didn’t yet have to explain yourself, in 1999, for liking Woody Allen, but you were already having to explain yourself for liking his movies. Celebrity, Deconstructing Harry, Everyone Says I Love You, Mighty Aphrodite, Bullets Over Broadway — these are the five films that preceded Sweet and Lowdown: four bad movies and one good one (Deconstructing) that no one respected.

People respected Sweet and Lowdown, with which Woody earned back some of the good name he’d begun to lose. Its two leads — Sean Penn and Samantha Morton — were nominated for Oscars following one of the best movie years of all time. Moreover, it let the world know that not only was Woody still capable of making a fresh film; he was capable of fresh approaches to doing so.

He used a new cinematographer, Zhao Fei (Raise the Red Lantern), but that’s only the start of it. More significant is that he alighted on settings never before seen in a Woody Allen film — namely, the 1930s jazz world, much of it west of the Mississippi. Naturally, New York and New Jersey were made to sit in, but you’d never know. Thank Santo Loquasto for that. Woody certainly has, writing in his autobiography that he always sticks the legendary production designer “with insurmountable problems and no money and he takes the no money and surmounts all the problems and his work is stunning.” As for Sweet and Lowdown, Allen frames the situation this way:

I am doing a movie that takes place in New York, in Jersey, in Los Angeles, in small towns across America, on Hollywood studio lots, in hills, across farmland — all in the 1930s, all period signs, cards, buildings, stores, and I stick Santo with a tiny budget — and oh, I don’t want to leave Manhattan, not for a single day….Santo accomplished all of the above.

Sepia-splashed throughout, the period production design feels distinctly authentic. There’s a whimsical, in-on-the-joke PBS-ness to the whole thing, accentuated by talking-head segments that introduce some of the dramatic episodes. “Why Emmet Ray? Because he was interesting.” That’s Woody Allen as himself, the talking head who kicks off the movie by explaining his (ostensible) reasons for making a (fictional) documentary about (the putatively real-life) Emmet Ray. “To me, Emmet Ray was a fascinating character,” he continues.

I was a huge fan of his when I was younger. I thought he was absolutely a great guitar player, and he was funny. You know, or if funny’s the wrong word, then, you know, sort of pathetic in a way. I mean, he was flamboyant and he was, you know, boorish and obnoxious.

With this mockumentary approach, Woody returned to his filmmaking roots, the first movie he ever directed having been Take the Money and Run, a kooky krime kaper that purported to tell the real story of another fictional figure. Sweet and Lowdown lacks that movie’s linear momentum but what it acquires in exchange is a shambling, essaystic insouciance, things foreshadowing and paying off all over the place, the talking heads framing the episodic scenes with circumstantial explanation, psychological analysis, musical appreciation. This is a character study we’re looking at, in the grand tradition of Citizen Kane.

Lowdown lacks Kane’s ambition, of course. We never see the deprived childhood, the defining trauma — we never get the Rosebud — and we never see the life develop. But that’s okay. At 93 minutes, what we get is a slice of Emmet Ray’s misadventurous life, the mystique of his personality, and the loss of his love.

Before that, we see love found. It happens in Atlantic City, where Emmet’s playing a gig, when he and his drummer “were doing their version of charm,” the jazz scholar Nat Hentoff tells us authoritatively: “they were trying to pick up girls on the boardwalk.” They see a couple of friends and decide amongst themselves who’s going to get who. They both want the redhead; Emmet loses a coinflip and has to settle for “the little one.”

That would be Hattie, played by Samantha Morton, a British actress whose Britishness never enters the frame of the movie, for her character is a mute. When Emmet finds this out, he’s disconsolate during a boatride together; nevertheless, the four of them spend the afternoon playing games and eating, and Emmet invites the girls to hear their band sometime, reasoning that “you might be mute, but you’re not deaf, right? And you don’t have to be bright. I mean, music’s for everybody — the smart or the dumb.”

By sunset, Emmet has convinced everyone to join him in one of his preferred pastimes, that of shooting rats by the dump. Afterward, when Emmet invites Hattie to his room to “hear me play my guitar,” Emmet is surprised but not at all dissatisfied with her eagerness to make love. Postcoitally, he tells her to “get dressed. I’m tired. I gotta go to sleep.” But Hattie hasn’t forgotten the promise he made about letting her hear him play.

She goes over to the guitar case, opens it, and brings the instrument to Emmet. “The guitar. Right. Well, that’s why we came up here.” Accepting it, Emmet repeats his demand that she get dressed and then asks what’s her favorite song. “Oh, look who I’m asking.” He strums out something sweet-tempered and wistful that compels Hattie to stop what she’s doing (getting dressed) and gaze into space with wonder and longing and, ultimately, satisfaction.

Morton’s ability to wordlessly convey all this is what got her an Oscar nomination for a role with no lines. (The role was originally offered to Rosie O’Donnell, but would anyone buy her as a mute?)

Next thing we know, Hattie’s eating a big old ice-cream sundae at a supper club while Emmet performs; then they’re watching trains together, this being Emmet’s favorite pastime next to shooting rats; then they’re shopping for clothes; then she’s watching him play pool, as admiring as when he’s playing music. Yes, we’re in montage mode now, meaning the two of them are apparently a couple.

What could possibly go wrong?

Jazz has always been such a central part of the Woody Allen identity and aesthetic, it’s easy to forget that Sweet and Lowdown is the first film of his to directly explore that world. The music always accompanies opening-title sequences and the action to follow, no matter how anachronistic this gambit may be. It’s almost always early stuff, too, “the primitive New Orleans records” of the 1930s that Allen has cherished since childhood, when he’d sit alone in his bedroom playing the clarinet to his favorite recordings, feeling in those moments that he

had finally found myself. The pleasure was so intense I decided I would devote my life to jazz. Little did I realize that [Sidney] Bechet, [Louis] Armstrong, George Lewis, Johnny Dodds, Jelly Roll Morton, and Jimmy Noone were musical geniuses. Their idiom was primitive, but within the parameters of New Orleans jazz, they had something truly magical inside them that oozed out of every note they blew.

Encoded in that testimony is another key to the Allen aesthetic, one that belongs to the broader, more superficial key of the music itself: within the parameters of New Orleans jazz. He allows that the particular style of jazz he most admires is “primitive,” but, according to the narrow set of rules under which it operates, its best performers are nevertheless able to achieve the “magical.” It allows for some insight into why Allen has been content to make movies the way he’s always made them — that is, it’s an endlessly replicable process whose possibilities are equally endless. There’s simplicity to the rules, complexity to the execution.

He still plays, of course, although he’s always understood that he is “listened to and tolerated on the basis of a movie career and not for anything worth a damn as far as jazz is concerned.” The 1997 documentary Wild Man Blues chronicled his life on tour performing throughout Europe (and gave a glimpse of what’s proved to be one of the most successful marriages in show-biz history). If he’s a jazz outsider, then he’s an outsider who long ago demonstrated his respect for the culture and its history.

Sweet and Lowdown is constantly having fun with that culture and the way its history has always been told. Tall stories often become taller in the retelling, and utterly strange mishaps abound. A grandiose stage-prop scheme turns downright perilous when Emmet attempts to descend astride a crescent moon; traveling through podunk country, he stops to hustle a charitable talent contest and is run out of town for the brilliance of his playing; and, while living in France as one of many American jazz refugees from the Great Depression, he gets romantically involved with a certified viper of a dame played by Uma Thurman, who will spell trouble shortly down the line.

These tropes are familiar but not cliched. They’re handled lightly, playfully, with an awareness of the tradition out of which they emerge.

There is another archetype: the towering genius whose rarefied reputation and abilities are daunting to our protagonist. “That man haunts me,” Emmet is always saying of Django Reinhardt, the real-life gypsy guitarist from out of this era whom Emmet considers the only man, woman, or beast whose playing transcends his own. “You know, really our styles are just different,” he might rationalize. “Nate Drummond prefers me.” Or he’ll say to Hattie during pillowtalk that his mother “sang beautifully. The most beautiful music I ever heard. Except for this gypsy guitar player in France.” It becomes a running gag. Emmet’s so intimidated by Reinhardt — his genius and his mystique — that he’s a threat to faint anytime Django’s even rumored to be around.

I’ve always loved Allen’s choice of Reinhardt here — famous but not household-famous, obscure to nonenthusiasts but unassailable among aficionados. “[H]e surpassed his very instrument,” writes the great jazz critic Whitney Balliett.

He created an almost disembodied, alternately delicate and roaring whorl of music….Reinhardt turned the songs he played inside out, decorating them with his winging vibrato, his pouring runs and glisses, his weaving and ducking single-note lines, and his sudden chordal tremolos and off-beat explosions. All these sounds were controlled by his incredible rhythmic sense….[H]e could leap ahead of the beat, or fall behind it, or ride it mercilessly.

Meanwhile, his fretboard hand carried two crippled fingers, allowing for “mysterious chords and melodic lines that no one had ever heard before.”

For Emmet Ray’s own picking, Sean Penn trained for months under jazz guitarist Howard Alden. The playing you hear is Alden’s but the fingers you see are Penn’s own. This achievement is secondary to the acting Penn pulls off throughout — Emmet’s distracted manner, clipped and impatient, blunt to suit Emmet’s personal crudity but also oblivious. This was Penn’s own devising, and Allen doesn’t mind giving him the credit. “The thing that you want,” he said about directing Penn, “is not to mess him up. I want him to do that thing that Sean Penn does that he’s always been great at….I had no discussions with Sean about who his character or what his prior life was.”

With Samantha Morton, he discussed Harpo Marx — namely, Harpo’s “muteness and voracious [gustatory] appetite,” according to the writer Jason Bailey in The Ultimate Woody Allen Film Companion. After finding out who Harpo Marx was, she got to work studying him as well as Allen’s other suggested model, Giulietta Masina in La Strada, the 1954 Fellini film in which Masina plays a character very much like the one Morton and Allen eventually crafted out of Hattie: mute and innocent, guileless, victim of falling for a crass narcissist with no consideration or respect for his partner.

Even the physical resemblance is pretty much identical, leaving no doubt as to Allen’s inspiration for the character.

When Emmet Ray finally gets his comeuppance, he gets it bad.

That viper dame played by Uma Thurman — Blanche, by name — eventually takes up with a gangster whose menace and air of danger fascinate her no end. She’s a tourist of bohemia, you see, and in her diary she records thoughts, observations, and other priceless pretentia. On first meeting Emmet, she writes, “He’s like a cat, feline with the guitar, which is his only, certainly his deepest love. No, his only. The sound — the beat, the ideas: where do they come from? Any woman would be second to his music.”

Blanche shares more than a little of the coy mischief communicated by Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction, just five years earlier, making her character as played by Thurman so easy to access. Emmet takes her to shoot rats and watch the trains, and of course Blanche’s mouth just can’t help itself. This was the 1930s, remember, and Freud was big among the bohemians. So it is that Blanche comes to ask him, “What is this fascination with trains?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you have the urge to go off, to ride to unknown destinations?”

“For what point?”

“Are you trying to capture some intangible feeling from childhood, when you dreamt of glorious cities just out of reach?”

“I’m not trying to capture anything from childhood. It stank.”

“Then I can only think it must be the power of the locomotive — the sheer, potent sexual energy — that arouses your masculinity: the wheels, the hot furnace, the pistons pumping.”

“You sound like you wanna go to bed with the train.”

This Emmet Ray may be a simpleton, Blanche decides, but he’s far from simple. One last, irresistible selection from her written musings:

“He’s impulsive and hot-tempered, yet he listens to the recordings of Django Reinhardt for hours and cries. He has never met this gypsy guitarist and never wants to — I think because he doesn’t want to learn Django’s mortal.”

The way Emmet relates himself to Reinhardt provides several other keys to his psyche. Sometimes the keys unlock very small cargo indeed: “There’s this gypsy in France, and he’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.” Emmet’s use of thing here is almost an acknowledgement that people are useful to Emmet only insofar as they inspire or otherwise assist him, that they’re not really people at all — an idea not mitigated by the way he treats those actually in his life.

Sometimes his relation to Reinhardt unlocks larger cargo, and leave it to Blanche to be the one to say it: “I’ve been trying to analyze what separates your playing from Django’s, and I say it’s that his feelings are richer. He’s not afraid to suffer in front of anybody. He doesn’t hold things in check — .”

“Stop talking about Django! The guy haunts me, all right?! Enough about Django!”

After staking out the laundry where Hattie works, Emmet approaches her one day on the boardwalk, the same boardwalk where he’d first picked her up. She’s sitting alone on a bench, eating a sandwich and looking out on the water, and the wounded look on her face when she sees him is fucking heartbreaking. It’s a look that simultaneously says, How could you? and How can you?

“You look healthy,” he tells her, then mentions that he’s in town to record a new song. “It’s a classic,” he opines, rather prematurely. Then he gets down to business: “Look, I’m sorry I cut out on you like that. It was time to move on, you know? I was fair. I told you not to fall in love with me. It’s nothing personal, yeah? It’s just, uh, I’m an artist. And, uh, you know, I like women, but they gotta have their place.”

It doesn’t get any better. At the end of him saying a bunch of other bullshit that doesn’t matter, Hattie hands Emmet a note, which he reads and then asks, “Happily?” After some perfunctory questions about does she have any kids (she does), he’s right back to the old defense mechanisms, giving her an “Ah, it’s just as well” and an “I can’t take entanglements”; for good measure, he throws in a “Well, I gotta go. We’re gonna take some chorus girls out tonight.”

After drinks, he takes his chorus girl out to watch the trains, just as he’s done with Hattie and Blanche and all the others. He literally has to drag her by the arm to get her there, and, once arrived, she does nothing but complain: “I don’t understand why you would take a nice girl like me out here!” He settles for playing the guitar, falling all the way into something wistful and melancholy. The song makes him so sad, he tells the girl to scram. All he can do is bark to himself, “I made a mistake!” over and over again, smashing his guitar against a tree and squealing his sobs.

At the risk of sounding like Blanche, I’m going to say that Emmet smashes his guitar because it fails to return all the love that he bestows on it — that if he only sounded like Django, the gypsy who haunts him, he’d get the love he needs from his guitar and the world beyond. The failure of this design for living frustrates him to madness.

But he achieves the sound he was looking for — at least he gets that. As jazz historian A.J. Pickman says in talking-head voiceover at the movie’s end, “I have no idea what happened to Emmet Ray. He just sort of disappeared, I guess. I mean, he did make, though, in those last couple years — he made really his best recordings. He never played more beautifully, even more movingly, and you know, something just seemed to kind of open up in him. And, you know, it was amazing because he was, finally — he was every bit as good as Django Reinhardt.”

Hattie saw in Emmet things not even he was able to see, and, when he left her, he left a woman who loved him more than he loves himself. But at least he now plays like Django. That’s the thing about music — not until you understand its subordinate place in the cosmos do you prove yourself worthy of its mastery.