The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (53 page)

Blanche’s infidelity inspires Emmet to write a song, “Unfaithful Woman,” which the movie’s various jazz enthuasiast narrators—Allen, Douglas McGrath (Allen’s co-writer on
Bullets Over Broadway),
Hentoff, and Ben Duncan—agree is a milestone of his career, and which Emmet himself designates “a classic.” The lesson implicit in the success of “Unfaithful Woman”—that art and life
are
related, that Ann was right in claiming that if he let his feelings out in real life, his music would be greater—is apparently not completely lost on Emmet. Providing a coda for the movie, jazz historian A.J. Pickman (David Okrent) affirms that Emmet’s last recordings were his best: “he never played more beautifully, more movingly. Something just seemed to open up in him, and it was amazing because he really was as good as Django.” It isn’t the betrayal by Blanche that generates the enrichment of his art to which the aptly named Pickman refers, of course, but the fact that when Emmet returns to Hattie’s New Jersey boardwalk laundry in an attempt to win her back, Hattie—in a wonderfully terse, bittersweet scene realized brilliantly by cinematographer Zhao Fei—informs him via her “chinaman” penmanship that she’s married and has become a mother. Penn’s nuanced portrayal of Emmet’s need to conceal the magnitude of his disappointment in this scene constitutes rebuttal enough to those critics who claim Allen’s films are lacking in effectively evoked emotion; the drunken bender Emmet goes on that night confirms the point.

Hattie’s terminal removal from his life does not in itself nullify Emmet’s chances of experiencing satisfying artistic achievements, and the summations of his career by Pickman and Allen allow us to imagine the pleasure which he might have derived from no longer having to declare himself second best to “this gypsy guitarist in France.” But their judgments also make clear that Emmet never appealed to more than a small audience of jazz aficionados, the banishment of Hattie having sentenced him to being the favorite of a very select cult following. Pickman’s celebration of Emmets deepened artistic capacity is preceded by a darker admission: “I have no idea what happened to Emmet Ray. He just sort of disappeared, I guess.” Allowing himself the last word, Allen echoes Pickman: “And then [Emmet] just seemed to fade away. I have no idea. Some people said he went to Europe, and some people feel he may have stopped playing altogether. But we do have, fortunately, those final recordings, and they’re great—they’re really beautiful.”

In one of American literature’s most celebrated dying fall endings, F. Scott Fitzgerald had the demoralized Dick Diver disappear into the small towns of rural New York, the narrator of
Tender Is the Night
a little archly concluding that, “in any case, he is almost certainly in that part of the country, in one town or another.”
¹⁷
In
Sweet and Lowdown,
Emmet Ray vanishes into his recordings, his music usurping his life. Despite the fact that, as Stephanie Zacharek suggests, “jazz lore is loaded with alternate endings, reckless embellishments and outright fabrications,”
¹⁸
what neither Pickman nor Allen questions is the disappearance of Emmet Ray. The “dying fall” coda of his life seems to be gospel, the musician having apparently evaporated completely into his music. Whereas the comedian narrators of
Broadway Danny Rose
are content to let Danny recede into their felicitous myth of his reconciliation with Tina,
Sweet and Lowdown's
similarly fablelike narrative ends on a distinctly more downbeat note, one generated by Emmet's complete failure to reconcile art and life.

The movie’s closing dramatization of that failure depicts Emmet drunk and belligerent in a bar with his latest chorus girl, Ellie (Gretchen Mol), whom he unceremoniously drags off to a railroad crossing to watch the freight trains thunder past. He removes his instrument from its case in a drunken attempt to prove to Ellie that he can make the guitar sound like a train, but then starts into “Sweet Sue,” which segues into “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles”—the song whose performance won Hattie’s heart. Because Ellie emblematizes the audience’s bad side (she can’t appreciate his playing because she needs to go to the bathroom), she is utterly oblivious to his performance, prompting him to verbally attack her, telling her to walk home: “Get out of here—leave me alone! I don’t need anybody!” he moans before smashing his guitar against a light pole and pitifully wailing, “I made a mistake! I made a mistake!” But Ellie has already left the railway crossing, and consequently Emmet has unlocked his feelings too late for anyone to hear them—except on records.

Allen’s closing encomia to the beauty of the recordings Emmet left behind for enthusiasts to treasure notwithstanding, the viewer understands those recordings to be the reapings of sorrow, the artistic harvest of “I made a mistake!” The mistake is believing that art can be quarantined from life; the mistake is failing to appreciate that the entanglements Emmet spends his life avoiding are in less self-isolated artists provocations to the greatest art, that the “terrible things that happen to people in love” inspire some of the worlds most compelling artworks. By terminally separating himself from the audience’s affections in repudiating Hattie, Emmet leaves himself with nothing but the cold—and merely temporary—comfort supplied by Blanche’s critical interrogations of his art and the dubious solace of his cult following. Emmets failure to restore himself in Hattie’s love compels him to cap his career through rehearsing the lessons of hurt on records, his sincere sorrow and overwhelming sense of loss prompting him to produce the best music of his life. A very central point of this movie, however, is how completely Emmet’s life has been eviscerated through its all-consuming devotion to art. The cost of “those final recordings” of Emmet’s which Allen characterizes as “great—they’re really beautiful” is that they usurped any life he had left.

By his own account, Woody Allen has never allowed his art to usurp his life. “I think that the thing I’ve had going for me is good focus,” he told Harland and Peters. “Films are not my top priority. I want to have dinner with my friends at a restaurant, I want to eat a leisurely lunch and not rush through it. I want to come home at six o’clock at night and not ten o’clock. If the choice was doing another angle on a shot or something and going home so I could watch the Knicks on television, I’d go home and not do the shot. So often in the last twenty years, I do everything one shot. People said this is a style, but it’s not a style, it’s just laziness. I just don’t have the patience. I’m bored with the scene after one time.” His equivocal dedication to art isn’t all that distinguishes Allen from his musician protagonist: “I always considered myself a very nice, sweet person, and not an artist. Not a dedicated artist at all. Sean Penn’s character was a nasty, egotistical braggart, an insensitive person, who is quite a fabulous guitar player. Maybe not the best in the world, but quite great. I’ve never thought that about myself.”
¹⁹

Arguably, Allen’s trademark denial of his protagonist as self-portraiture underestimates the coldness factor which unites him with Emmet while affirming the magnitude of the primary difference distinguishing them: Emmet sacrifices his life to his art, whereas Allen willingly sacrifices his art to leisurely meals with friends and Knicks games. In his review of Marion Meade’s 1999 Allen biography, Michael Wood characterizes
Sweet and Lowdown
as “the movie where, perhaps for the first time, Allen gets the guilt of his central male character fully in focus, without allowing him to whimper, or slipping him a few excuses for his behavior.”
²⁰
Emmet’s guilt at subordinating life—his lovers/his audience—to his art generates a full-blown dramatic epiphany in
Sweet and Lowdown,
one that provokes him to bawl, “I made a mistake!” to a deserted railway crossing. Emmet’s mistake of over-valuing art is not one Allen is wont to make, clearly, and it is not unreasonable to read
Sweet and Lowdown’s
Emmet Ray fable as containing an implicit justification for Allen’s equivocal commitment to his own cinematic art. If, as Blanche asserts, “even in making love, [Emmet] seems to exist in a world of his own,” his dedication to his art inhibiting his ability to make contact with his sexual partner, Emmet’s creator seems to have devoted himself so deliberately to the world of his everyday life as to practically ensure that his art will never submerge his existence nor approach the intensity of self-confrontation which spawns Emmet’s devastating epiphany Subordinating one’s art to the imperatives of maintaining a pleasant life can be, of course, an alternative means of “hold[ing] his feelings in check.”

Janet Maslin’s
New York Times
review of
Sweet and Lowdown
may have been obliquely addressing Allen’s hedged aesthetic commitments in suggesting that his tone in the movie “is too genial, despite the characters obvious dark side, to allow Emmet much weight,”
²¹
and thus she judged the film “light.” Perhaps so, but for an artist endlessly skeptical about the premises of and promises that have been made for art throughout a century’s over-valuation,
Sweet and Lowdown
may constitute the perfect compromise between Allen’s artistic ambition and personal impatience; it may strike the perfect balance equalizing Allen’s cinematic aspiration, one-shot boredom, and individual modesty. For the purposes of this now-concluded study of Allen’s films, the crowning irony of his career may be that this light, genial, lovely film more effectively and movingly epitomizes Allen’s profoundly conflicted dedication to art than many of his more celebrated and serious movies. In its lowdown, one-shot, art-mistrusting way, in other words,
Sweet and Lowdown
may become Allen’s “Unfaithful Woman”—one of the “classics” which will ultimately prove its artist to be, if not “as good as Django Reinhardt,” at least “quite great.” Should Allen achieve such a reputation, it will be a product not only of the very real substantiality of his individual films; it will be testimony as well to the distinctly postmodern ambivalence toward art that his filmmaking career has been unflaggingly dedicated to exploring, enacting, and projecting on movie screens.

Notes

1. That Old Black Magic: Woody Allen’s Ambivalent Artistry

1. John Lahr, “The Imperfectionist,”
The New Yorker,
December 5, 1996, p. 82.

2. “People tend to think [movies like
Husbands and Wives
] reflect my life in some way,” Allen told the
Philadelphia Inquirer,
“But basically, they don’t reflect my life.”
Philadelphia Inquirer,
Sunday, August 22, 1993, p. G8.

3. Woody Allen,
Deconstructing Harry
(Fine Line Features, 1997).

4. John Baxter quotes Allen’s acknowledgment that Roth was a model for Harry in
Woody Allen: A Biography
(London: Harper Collins, 1998), p. 436.

5. Carvers story (collected in
Where I’m Calling From: New and Selected Stories
) depicts a writer not unlike Carver being attacked by his ex-wife for using the unhappiness of their marriage as material for fiction. The existence of the story called “Intimacy” in Carver’s story collection dramatically and cruelly validates the justice of the wife’s charge of literary exploitation.

6. Woody Allen,
Stardust Memories,
in
Four Films of Woody Allen
(New York: Random House, 1982), p. 283.

7. Woody Allen,
Manhattan, Four Films of Woody Allen,
p. 259.

8. Woody Allen,
Annie Hall, Four Films of Woody Allen,
p. 4.

9. Frederick Exley,
A Fan’s Notes
(New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 361.

10. Woody Allen,
Alice
(Orion Pictures, 1990).

11. Woody Allen,
Hannah and Her Sisters
(New York: Vintage Books, 1987), p. 150.

12. Woody Allen,
Shadows and Fog
(Orion Pictures, 1992).

13. Woody Allen,
Play It Again, Sam
(Paramount Home Video, 1980).

14. Woody Allen,
Broadway Danny Rose,
in
Three Films of Woody Allen
(New York: Random House, 1987), p. 254.

15. Woody Allen,
Mighty Aphrodite
(Miramax Films, 1995).

16. “Here I am just fighting for a laugh and trying to do a scene,” Allen said about critical responses to
Love and Death,
“and they’re discussing it like it was genuinely Dostoevski.” Lee Guthrie,
Woody Allen: A Biography
(New York: Drake Publishers, Inc.), p. 143.

17. Woody Allen, “Remembering Needleman,” in
Side Effects
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1981), p. 6.

18. Allen, “My Apology,” in
Side Effects,
p. 53.

19. Martin Ritt,
The Front,
screenplay by Walter Bernstein (Columbia Pictures, 1976).

20. Woody Allen,
Manhattan,
p. 197.

21. Stephen J. Whitfield, “Laughter in the Dark: Notes on American-Jewish Humor,” in Sanford Pinsker, ed.,
Critical Essays on Philip Roth
(Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982), p. 196.

22. Of the critical works published on Allen’s films, Annette Wernblad’s
Brooklyn is Not Expanding: Woody Allen’s Comic Universe
(Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992) is the most firmly and consistently grounded in the traditions of Jewish American and Yiddish humor.

23. Eric Lax,
Woody Allen: A Biography
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), pp. 197–98.

24. Amidst the unremittingly Kafkaesque bleakness of
Shadows and Fog,
Kleinman encounters his former fiancée (Julie Kavner), who still begrudges the fact that he couldn’t be found on their wedding day because he was fornicating with her sister in a closet; amidst the bitter cycle of betrayals and joyless recouplings which is
Husbands and Wives,
Sally (Judy Davis) terrifies her hypercivilized, opera-loving date (Timothy Jerome) by screaming at her ex-husband (Sydney Pollock) on the date’s telephone and then responding to his telling her that he has gotten them tickets for this evening’s performance of
Don Giovanni,
“Fucking Don Juans—they should cut his fucking dick off.”