Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9520 in DVD
• Released on: 2000-06-20
• Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, Full Screen, NTSC
• Original language: English, French
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish, French
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 95 minutes

Amazon.com
Woody Allen makes beautiful music but only fitful comedy with his story of "the second greatest guitar player in the world." Sean Penn plays Emmett Ray, an irresponsible, womanizing swing guitar player in Depression-era America who is guided by an ego almost as large as his talent. "I'm an artist, a truly great artist," he proclaims time and time again, and when he plays, soaring into a blissed-out world of pure melodic beauty, he proves it. Samantha Morton almost steals the film as his mute girlfriend Hattie, a sweet Chaplinesque waif who loves him unconditionally, and Uma Thurman brings haughty moxie to her role as a slumming socialite and aspiring writer who's forever analyzing Emmett's peculiarities (like taking his dates to shoot rats at the city dump). The vignettelike tales are interspersed with comments by jazz aficionados and critics, but this is less a Zelig-like mockumentary than an extension of the self-absorbed portraits of Deconstructing Harry and Celebrity. The lazy pace drags at times and the script runs dry between comic centerpieces--the film screams for more of Allen's playful invention--but there's a bittersweet tenderness and an affecting vulnerability that is missing from his other recent work. Shot by Zhao Fei (The Emperor and the Assassin, Raise the Red Lantern), it's one of Allen's most gorgeous and colorful films in years, buoyed by toe-tapping music and Penn's gruffly charming performance. --Sean Axmaker

From The New Yorker
Sean Penn, in cream-colored suits and matching hat, a cigarette dangling from his lips, gives one of the best performances ever seen in a Woody Allen film. He plays Emmet Ray, the notorious (and made-up) jazz guitarist from the thirties, a great artist who was also a worm and a loser. Emmet handles his instrument almost as well as his idol Django Reinhardt, but he's the victim of his own neuroses and obsessions. His not knowing himself at all is turned into a joke, but it's also played for pathos-incomprehension is Emmet's soulfulness, mysteriously linked to his elegant playing. The picture is made up of short vignettes framed by "memories" of Emmet spoken by various experts, including Allen himself, and the entire movie is caught in the loving grip of jazz-world nostalgia, with its stylized glamour of thirties clothes and cars-the tawdry life on the road, in which the greatest art was made on the run. With the English actress Samantha Morton, hatted and crumpet-faced, her body hidden in a shapeless dress, as the mute girl who falls for Emmet. Golden-hued cinematography by Zhao Fei. The contemporary guitarists Howard Alden and Bucky Pizzarelli do the playing. In all, one of Allen's finest achievements. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Emmet Ray: Wanna go to the dump and shoot some rats?
Woody Allen's "Sweet and Lowdown" (1999), a fictional biopic about "the world's second best jazz guitarist," Emmet Ray is sweet, funny, dramatic, filled with fantastic music and is simply terrific. "Sweet and Lowdown" reminds "Bullets over Broadway" (1994), another Allen's period movie set in the nostalgic area of great jazz and gangsters who understood and supported art and the artists, at least to the certain points. Sean Penn gave IMO his best performance as the man as talented as he was egotistic and self-centered. Creating and performing brilliantly the clear, magical, and melancholic guitar compositions, Emmett Ray (Penn) was also busy with kleptomania, a little pimping on the side, dealing with gangsters, shooting rats and watching passing trains as his favorite hobbies, and also drinking, and chasing girls. Young Samantha Morton who was only 21 and ironically never seen any Allen's movie prior to taking a role of Penn's mute girlfriend-laundress, had to do all the acting with her face, eyes, and body language and was she good. The unrequited tender and all-forgiving love has the face, and that's Samantha's face in Woody Allen's bittersweet, comical and poignant Fake documentary about a true talent which was larger than the man who possessed it.

The Beginning of a Tsunami
It may be Woody Allen's second best film, next to Annie Hall and is at least partly responsible for a popular resurgence of interest in the legendary Romany guitar virtuoso, Django Reinhardt. Enough has been written about the film's wonderful cinematography, fine performances by Sean Penn and Samantha Morton and Mr. Allen's brilliant direction. Here I would like to emphasize the real star of the film: the music, as arranged and played by Howard Alden, one of the great new-generation jazz guitarists helping to bring about the revival of jazz Manouche, or Gypsy jazz.

Sweet and Lowdown helped create a new audience for this once ubiquitous European style, the almost singular creation of Django Reinhardt, swing jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli and the other house musicians of the now historic Parisian nightspot, Le Hot Club du France. A volatile amalgam of Romany folk melodies, musette dance tunes and newly-imported American jazz (which arrived in France shortly after 'the Great War') Django's music took fire in the nineteen thirties, surviving the Nazi occupation and thriving well into the post-WWII era. The death of Django Reinhardt in 1953 and the emergence of bebop effectively ended the public love affair with jazz Manouche, which all but vanished as record collectors snapped up the surviving 78s and only a few poorly mastered LP recordings survived.

But Django's solos, his amazing technique and signature tunes would survive over the decades in the Romany caravans from which it came, to resurface in the past decade as the Hot Club Revival, drawing increasingly large gatherings of musicians and fans to Django festivals, Django Jazz camps and nightclubs all over the world featuring Gypsy Jazz Nights. After digitally remastered CDs brought Reinhardt's prolific recordings back to the mainstream and a new generation of jazz musicians discovered the joys of playing this challenging style, the revival took root. Now there is a new generations of Gypsy jazz guitarists such as Bireli Lagrene, Angelo DeBarre, Stochelo Rosenberg and others, who are responsible for keeping the flame alive.

Howard Alden did an amazing job recreating the sound and energy of Hot Club swing, providing a much deeper level of authenticity to what, in the wrong hands, could have been just another shallow period piece. The cars and clothes may have a vintage look and feel, but the music sounds fresh, vibrant and extremely listenable, even to the uninitiated ear.

If you haven't seen this film, you're in for a treat. Afterwards, you may want to venture out to hear more of this incredible music, thereby joining the tidal wave of Django enthusiasts literally sweeping the music world. And that wave isn't cresting any time soon.

-Bill Barnes

Masterful
Sweet and Lowdown is a masterful film, only let down slightly by sagging in one or two places. Like most of Woody Allen's films, it is rich in comedy, albeit more subtle than some of his earlier efforts. It tells the story of Emmet Ray, the world's second best jazz guitarist in a fictional documentary style, with asides from Allen and others who comment on the protagonist's life. Jazz is one of Allen's consuming passions (as most people know, he is an accomplished clarinet player himself) and partially due to this he admits to a missing nostalgia for the 1930s, missing out on experiencing that period (Allen was born in 1935).

Great art usually comes out of the artist's most personal passions, as a result, Allen reprises the era superbly: the locations, automobiles, jazz clubs, towns and parties are recreated in glorious warmth. The dialogue is sharp, honed down and witty so it slips down like a glass of bourbon. Sean Penn is superb as Emmet, the egotistical guitarist, who plays with a sprightly, engaged look of puzzlement on his face. He cares for no one except himself, 'look, I'm not the marrying sort, it leaves me cold'. Realising that girls go for arrogant, artistically gifted men, he uses his talents to manipulate women. That is, until he meets charming mute laundress, Hattie, who captivates him with her silence. After she makes an unlikely break into Hollywood, Emmet becomes jealous. In turn he leaves her, but realises he has blown his best chance of happiness, and his relationships with other, more intellectually inquisitive women lead to a downhill spiral in his life.

This is a finely written character movie, the escapades of Emmet are brilliantly commented on by Allen, who, as ever, is sublime at parodying those wannabe tough intellectuals who pontificate on low life culture - 'The thing with these emigre stories, you never know how much is made up...' and the acting is first rate througout. Allen does a fine job in producing a film about the perils of artistic genius, which is far superior to his attempt to do the same about Celebrity, in that other lousy epoymous film of his.