Bittersweet . . .

Rating: Null/10 (24 July 2014)

Emmett Ray is a man who can't see past the end of his nose. Were it not for his fingers which play jazz music beautiful enough to make angels weep he would probably be a bum living in an alley.
Woody Allen's 1930s comedy 'Sweet and Lowdown' is a character study about a character whose music is sweet but whose personality is as pleasant as bad cheese. He is legendary as 'The Second Greatest Jazz Guitarist in the World'. However his idea of a date is to take a woman to the tracks to watch the trains or down to the garbage dump to shoot rats.
He meets a mute woman named Hattie (Samantha Morton) who is just exactly the kind of woman he likes: mute and waiting on him and foot. Like most things in his life he doesn't know what a gift he has and can't forgive himself when he gives it up.
Morton has the tougher role, she has to convince us that she really loves this worthless lug but has to do it without spoken word. Her face is sweet, expressive and we almost always know what she is thinking.
Emmett has one pall over his life. He has a phobia about meeting Django Reinhart, legendary for being 'The Greatest Jazz Guitarist in the World'. Emmett does eventually run into Reinhart providing one of the movie's funniest moments.
Emmett would be almost impossible to take in this film were he not played by Sean Penn. Penn is a brilliant actor who knows how to disappear into a role and make us care about the character. Here he has the tough task of making us care about someone who is a complete jerk. He makes Emmett Ray into a lovable guy even when we know we aren't suppose to like him.
That is also based on the strength of Woody Allen's writing. He has written a fiction chapter of jazz history about a man out of touch with everything but his music.