Film - Jonathan Romney on the highs and lows of New York's most prolific director
Sweet and Lowdown is Woody Allen's 28th cinema feature; his 29th, Small Time Crooks, was recently released in the United States. Since 1969, Allen has been making features at the rate of roughly one a year. He has long been a fact of cinematic life, and although many viewers would regard him as central to modern American film, he is also undeniably marginal to it. While maintaining an imperious distance from the mainstream film industry, Allen has consistently been able to pursue whatever idiosyncratic whims occur to him and still, once in a while, register a modest box-office presence.
Even if you can't abide him, you have to salute him. He continues to make films that owe nothing to Hollywood's agenda. He still contrives fresh variations on old routines. However inconsequential many of his films are, they still yield complex, serious grist for discussion. And - although this sometimes seems just an added bonus - they do, more often than not, make us laugh, too.
It's easy to take Woody Allen for granted as someone who will always be there. But even hardcore devotees occasionally have their doubts: his last film, Celebrity, was a self- important, out-of-touch rant to the effect that fame is a debasing chimera, and contemporary popular culture only distracts us from life's higher values. What was most depressing about Celebrity was its tone of lugubrious incomprehension - the film seemed the work of someone who had once been at the heart of it all, who had set the tone, and then belatedly realised that the party had moved on.
Allen's ivory tower once seemed the nerve centre of a certain American world: in the Seventies, Annie Hall and Manhattan invoked the aspirational model of a culturally voracious, imaginative, hedonist intelligentsia, a superclass of Guggenheim-going Chekhovian loungers who were equally open to the pleasures of high art and of tolerably middle-brow pop culture. Allen practically invented, in other words, the model New Yorker reader. But now that world looks as dated, as pompously elitist as the New Yorker's own nuttier consumer ads - the perfect sunhat, the deluxe smoked oysters.
These days, mercifully, Allen only occasionally depicts that world, although its cultural assumptions still shape his films. What's most troubling is the way he insists on depicting people excluded from that world. Allen himself, as a Bronx-born Jew, used to play up his own outsider status: he once depicted himself as a Hassid at a Wasp dinner table. But increasingly the outsiders in his films have been misunderstood and lampooned. In Deconstructing Harry, Allen finally created a black character - and made her a tart-with-a-heart in pink vinyl. Race is one blind spot; class is another. Brash, gun-toting men-of-the-people often serve to defuse the pretensions of a spoilt, literate character. In Bullets Over Broadway, a gangster proves more naturally creative than an earnest young playwright; a mobster is similarly an arbiter of street-wisdom in Sweet and Lowdown. But these are less characters than cartoon figures contrived to embarrass and enlighten the more subtly limned artist heroes.
But what worries Allen more than class or race is taste, which is where his snobbery truly rankles. He can't resist a dig at anyone who has not been educated to his own rarefied canon, such as the too loud, too buxom prostitute in Mighty Aphrodite. The snobbery, often accompanied by misogyny, reached grotesque proportions in Husbands and Wives, where Lysette Anthony's character is basted for practising the contemptible combination of aerobics and astrology.
I haven't yet seen Small Time Crooks, but reviews suggest that class and culture are again the problems. This time, Allen himself plays the vulgarian - a criminal who accidentally becomes wealthy, only for his even crasser wife (Tracey Ullman) to develop a farcical taste for Manhattan high culture. The American critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has pointed out the contradictions in the director's own cultural attitude, arguing that Allen never questions his own equation of art and money. Rosenbaum cruelly but neatly spears Allen's famous affection for sober art cinema: what he really seems to like about Ingmar Bergman, Rosenbaum suggests, is less the work itself than "the fact that they served espresso in the lobby of the theatre where he first saw it".
In recent years, Allen has played down the high culture and protested that he only wants to lift the soul a little, in the good old showbiz way. Sweet and Lowdown proposes, quite convincingly, that an old-fashioned tune played con amore can redeem the thorniest heart. Its anti-hero, a 1930s jazz guitarist called Emmet Ray (Sean Penn), seems an incorrigible creep - boozer, womaniser, narcissist, thief - yet his sublime musicianship suggests that somewhere in this sinner's soul is the essence of an angel.
There's nothing original in that proposition, nor in the vehicle of his redemption: the love of a good woman - the mute, doting laundress Hattie, played by the remarkable young British actress Samantha Morton.
Nevertheless, grace, charm and conviction lift the film, just as they lift Emmet's rendition of a mouldy tune such as "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles". So what, really, if Allen per- petuates the myth that great jazz must emerge from low-life disrepute and pain? After all, he has deflated that myth in other films. The film's real flaw is the way it recycles the same old class arguments. Emmet's wife, played with feline self-mockery by Uma Thurman, is an empty-headed rich girl who ludicrously fancies herself a bohemian, while Hattie, who has no pretensions and barely any self, provides the inspirational fuel that at last breaks Emmet's heart and allows him to produce a quintessentially poignant "Bubbles".
Allen clearly believes that a single perfect jazz recording can redeem an entire life. To give him credit, Allen loves jazz not for the espresso, but for the music - in fact, he seems blithely indifferent to the surrounding paraphernalia of the jazz life. Emmet could be a writer, a painter or any sort of Dostoevskian prodigal: Allen omits the familiar mythology of jazz lifestyle to the extent of eliding the black presence in the music in all but a couple of brief scenes.
Largely thanks to Morton's nuanced and totally wordless performance, we can be touched by the character of Hattie, even while being embarrassed by the sentimental Chaplin-era image of the mute, understanding muse. The film ends with a disgruntled flapper uncomprehendingly shrugging at Emmet's heartbreaking brilliance, where soulful Hattie would have swooned over it. The two women, in Allen's world-view, are complementary opposites: faced with true artistry, a girl either gets it and admires, or she doesn't and looks a fool. Whatever this reveals about Allen's view of women, it also betokens his expectations of his audience: we either get his work and admire it unreservedly, or we churlishly reject it out of hand.
Yet this seems to be a grievous misunderstanding of the complex pleasures of being a Woody-watcher: we can admire, enjoy, cherish his films, yet continue to be troubled, even outraged by them. Sweet and Lowdown is a touching, gently profound miniature with more intelligence and feeling than you find in most current cinema; it's also infuriatingly archaic and blinkered. No other film-maker consistently elicits such contradictory reactions; but that, I am tempted to say, has always been, and continues to be, the point of Woody Allen.
Sweet and Lowdown (PG) is on nationwide release
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by using the 'report this comment' facility or by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
