Sweet and Lowdown (1999)

Woody Allen's 1999 mockumentary concerns Emmet Ray, a jazz guitarist of the 1930s who idolizes Django Reinhardt, mistreats nearly everyone, and shoots rats at the dump for recreation. We are asked to find him charming, and Sean Penn, to his credit, nearly manages it. The film's social consciousness, however, is essentially nil. The cast is uniformly white, the women exist as conquests or as literary slumming, and the Romani identity of the guitarist Ray worships goes unmentioned. Reinhardt is present as a genius and nothing else, a choice the film never interrogates.

Then there is Hattie, the mute laundress played by Samantha Morton, instructed by Allen to model her work on Harpo Marx. Her silence is a device for romantic pathos, not a statement about disability, neurodiversity, or access. She is a presence, as one reviewer had it, and the film uses her the way silent cinema used its heroines. Body positivity does not intrude. Neither does any economic argument, despite a protagonist who pimps, squanders, and steals without the film ever suggesting that the arrangement is a system instead of a personality.

The interview interludes featuring critics and biographers are the closest the film comes to commentary, and they are jokes. They lend the invented guitarist a false documentary weight, and their tone is affectionate and wry. Nothing is preached. The picture is preoccupied with the old subjects: talent, vanity, self-destruction, and the woman who got away. It is a well-made film about a bad man, and it has no interest in instructing anyone about anything. On the scale that concerns us, it registers almost nothing.