Off-key biopic not worth the trouble

Rating: Null/10 (12 September 2000)

There are, it says here, two types of biographies: one centres around a character whose exploits merit recounting; the other features a figure whose life may not have been extraordinary yet presents the biographer with the opportunity to offer the audience insights into the human spirit, psyche or behaviour.
Insight isn't always easy to come by. In life, there are people who diligently mask their feelings and motivations, who shield themselves from attempts at examination or explanation, whose pasts remain opaque. Sometimes, the subject is sufficiently important, or the person's life sufficiently interesting, to justify a biography even though meaningful insights into the subject's character are scarce.
Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown seems to centre on such a subject. He is Emmet Ray, a 1930s jazz virtuoso whose guitar playing is sublime and whose life is a train wreck. Named after a little-noted 1944 Benny Goodman vehicle, Sweet and Lowdown presents Ray as a man whose musical genius is offset by character flaws so numerous as to comprise an entire catalogue of inadequacies and pathologies.
Ray may be the "second-greatest guitarist in the world," but he is also a kleptomaniac and a drunk, childishly irresponsible and egocentric. He is arrogant although insecure, socially inept, emotionally inaccessible -- sometimes even cruel -- to his wives and lovers. He is a braggart and a boor and, finally, self-destructive and self-defeating. A fool with magic fingers. But interesting.
Or, rather, could have been interesting.
The problem with this picture is that Emmet Ray is fictional, a product wholly of Allen's imagination.
This would be fine, had an effort been made to offer even a glimmer of insight into the processes that could have produced such a singular character. He doesn't, although the pseudo-documentary style of the picture, complete with "talking head" reportage from various "experts," including Allen himself, gave him ample opportunity to do so.
Other than Ray's offhand, post-coitus admission to his lover that his father used to beat him, the viewer is denied any glimpse into whatever may lay beneath the annoying exterior of the man, and therefore denied the pleasure of experiencing the sympathy that comes with understanding.
If there's any reason at all to invest time and money on this film it's to see the performance of Samantha Morton as the mute Hattie, which is every bit as good as they say. Sean Penn as Ray does an admirable job portraying the kind of out-of-control and slightly berserk character that's his specialty. Both efforts are ultimately wasted.
There is simply no excuse for creating a vivid, complex character and then declining to offer a clue as to how he got that way. There's enough of that in real life.