At the
Movies All that jazz
By JOSEPH CUNNEEN
The hot jazz of Sweet and
Lowdown is enough to carry this new Woody Allen pseudo-documentary.
Its built around a string of mostly comic anecdotes about Emmett Ray, a
fictional 30s guitarist who was considered second only to Django
Reinhardt. Sean Penn, flamboyant and grotesque, gives an Oscar-worthy
performance as Ray. Woody is only a narrative voice, along with a string of
jazz experts who introduce amusing stories they want to tell about the central
character.
The combination of Santo Loquastos production design and Fei
Zhaos cinematography puts a golden glow on Depression-era honky-tonks and
gangsters. Nostalgia for the past is best expressed when Ray plays effortlessly
in an after-hours session with a group of black jazz artists at one of their
homes.
Most of the time, however, he is impossibly self-centered. His
idea of fun is to take a woman to the dump to shoot rats, then wander over to
the train tracks to hear the mournful sounds of passing freights. A pimp and a
kleptomaniac, he treats women with almost total callousness. Of course, the
itinerant and financially uncertain lives of jazz musicians were a poor school
for husbands, and Ray was honest about his attitude: I dont need
women. Theyre not necessary if youre a true artist.
Allen succeeds in making this story entertaining because he knows
that Ray is totally incompetent except on the guitar. His hair parted high on
one side, his brow furrowed and wearing a Chaplinesque mustache, Ray seems both
to strut and self-destruct; when he actually sees Django Reinhardt, he faints.
His constant megalomania hides a deep insecurity, and the elaborate prop he
constructs in order to make a dramatic entrance collapses ignominiously.
Despite the movies implicit misogyny, most of its sequences
are amusing and provide pretexts for a fine score, including All of
Me, Im Forever Blowing Bubbles and Ill See
You in my Dreams. But Sweet and Lowdown has no dramatic
development; its thematic clues are never pursued, perhaps in accordance with
the directors formalist esthetic. In the end, Allen tells us, Ray allowed
his own emotions greater expression and made his best records; then, he simply
disappeared.
A memory movie that jazz lovers shouldnt miss, Sweet
and Lowdown is both jaunty and melancholy.
The End of the Affair was
never my favorite Graham Greene novel. The Catholic aspects of its plot seem
more artificial than those of The Power and the Glory or The Heart of
the Matter. Its power derives from the voice of the narrator (Maurice
Bendrix, an adulterous novelist) who, spewing out his anger at God, is forced
to recognize the paradox of becoming angry with Someone who does not exist.
Neil Jordan has made a new movie version, which Columbia Pictures, presumably
because Ralph Fiennes plays Bendrix, is advertising as this years
The English Patient.
Since I found that earlier hit boring and pretentious, its
small praise to say that Fiennes is far more convincing this time.
Jordans intelligent screenplay handles the shifts in narrative time with
great skill and captures the atmosphere of London during the latter days of
World War II.
The film opens with Bendrix typing his diary of hate
(directed more against God than against Sarah, the married woman who had broken
off their affair); a flashback cuts to a rainy evening two years after she left
him when Bendrix meets the stuffy husband Henry (Stephen Rea), who has come to
suspect Sarah of deceiving him. Bendrix, jealous because she is seeing someone
else, hires a cockney detective, Mr. Parkis (Ian Hart), to investigate her
movements, and Jordan does well with the resulting comic possibilities of the
Parkis/Bendrix relationship.
Though there is plenty of athletic lovemaking in The End of
the Affair, much of it to the accompaniment of bombs falling on London,
the movie is (correctly) more interested in exploring the consequences of
Sarahs later behavior. The novel has an advantage here, since it is
presented as Bendrixs diary, but to include more than a few extracts
would make the film far too talky.
The popularity of the film will probably depend on how deeply
audiences identify with its central characters. Since it is difficult to
romanticize the Bendrix-Sarah affair, which is poisoned from the outset by the
novelists jealousy, Jordan sentimentalizes the material by using
occasional bits of soft music during the later scenes. Fiennes deserves praise
for risking his matinée idol status by clearly bringing out the
unattractive aspects of Bendrixs character. On the other hand, although
Sarah is surely right when she tells Bendrix that love doesnt end
because we wont see each other any more, there is little effort to
give dramatic substance to this hint.
More emotionally compelling and more
positive in tone, Pedro Almodóvars All About My Mother is
probably the best movie of the year. The Spanish director, usually identified
with outrageous excess, has made what he calls a screwball drama to
praise the resiliency of women, with a special tribute to actresses who play
actresses. If the emotions are again sometimes exaggerated, there is a deep
sense of human community in the way Almodóvar develops his basic
metaphor of the world as a stage.
A plot summary could easily make the movie seem hysterical while
failing to suggest its richness. I will need to see it again to appreciate the
skill with which the director controls the lightning-fast emotional changes of
the story through attention to colors, and even to the movement of inanimate
objects, which act as a curtain might in the theater.
Beginning as a simple tale of a loving mother and her 17-year-old
son -- Manuela (Cecilia Roth) and Esteban (Eloy Azorín) -- the plot
takes a sudden, painful turn toward tragedy when the son dies. The mother, who
works as a nurse in a Madrid organ donor unit and had performed in a seminar
dramatization intended to persuade people to donate the organs of loved ones
who are dying, is now forced to replay that scene in reality.
We hear Estebans voice as Manuela tearfully reads his
journal. The boy had wanted to find out about the missing parts of his life;
she had never told him who his father was. Now Estebans death makes her
rush to Barcelona to fill in the past.
It is a shocking underground world that she is forced to explore
there, featuring prostitutes and transvestites, but she boldly pursues her
purpose. This involves Manuela playing the part of Stella one night in
Tennessee Williams The Streetcar Named Desire, a significant
motif throughout the movie.
Though the movie is a tearjerker, it is also sometimes hilarious,
notably when one of the characters takes the stage after a performance of
Streetcar is cancelled and explains the price of each hormone and
silicone transplant: It cost me a lot to be authentic. The happy
collaboration of director and actress allows us to see the authentic humanity
of this complex character.
Amazingly, Almodóvar never permits the sensational aspects
of his story to get out of control. He is well aware that he is celebrating
artifice but insists that women must employ it in this world in order to
survive. The movie becomes a test case in which such artifice serves the
continuity of life across the generations. We must all improvise our lives, the
director is suggesting, and women -- especially actresses -- can be wonderful
role models. Maybe thats why hes gotten such moving performances
from the principals of All About My Mother.
Joseph Cunneen is NCRs regular movie
reviewer.
National Catholic Reporter, December 17,
1999
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