![]() ![]() He has established an easy target for humour in the definitive jerk that is Emmet Ray. ![]() ![]() Although it suffers from an abrupt shift of narrative and tone in its later stages, Sweet and Low- down finds Woody Allen in spirited form. Morton and Penn both received Oscar nominations earlier this year for their performances in Sweet and Lowdown, which also features Uma Thurman as an aspiring novelist, Anthony LaPaglia as a contract killer, and director John Waters as a hotel manager. Unexpectedly, Ray softens a little when he falls for a mute, sweet-natured laundry worker engagingly played by Samantha Morton, the versatile young English actress from Under the Skin and the recent Jesus' Son. When one date complains, he protests, "Well, I brought sandwiches". And his idea of a night out is take a woman down to the local rubbish pit to shoot rats. ![]() The boorish, arrogant and patronising guitarist is also a part-time pimp and a kleptomaniac who, we are told, once stole an alarm clock from Hoagy Carmichael, causing him to miss a recording session. Played with terrific panache by Sean Penn with the cheesiest of grins and sleaziest of moustaches, Emmet Ray is revealed as an outrageously vain and self-deluding character who drops women as casually as he picks them up and tries to justify his bad behaviour by putting it down to the artistic temperament of a genius. His putative status is embellished by on-screen contributions from, among others, Nat Hentoff, Douglas McGrath and Woody Allen himself. Ray, the opening titles inform us, recorded several classics on the RCA Victor label in the 1930s and was regarded as second only to Django Reinhardt in his heyday. Sweet and Lowdown unites Allen's key creative passions, movies and jazz music, in one film, which is shaped as a faux documentary on an allegedly brilliant jazz guitarist, Emmet Ray. This film, belatedly arriving here, was launched at the Venice and Toronto festivals last September and is the first of two movies from the remarkably productive Woody Allen to reach us this year his latest, Small Time Crooks, is due in November. ![]()
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