Movieline Magazine nominated Penn in its Alternative Oscars for Smallest Stretch as an Actor (he plays a self-obsessed, arrogant artist) and Best Performance by a Rodent. Both are as apt as they are snarky; Penn's character, Emmet Ray, is a real rat bastard. Emmet is the second-best jazz guitarist in the world, a status of which he never fails to remind people, whose favorite pasttime is shooting rats at the dump (is that fratricide?). His guitar playing may be his sole virtue, aside from an Elvis-like impulsive generosity, and therein lies the problem. His self-absorption and oblivious cruelty may be funny at first, but they wear thin after a while. And the film never really goes anywhere; it doesn't seem to have anything deeper to say than "He's a jerk whose only emotional attachment is to his music."
Penn wins the best rodent performance prize hands down, but I would have bumped him from the Oscars in favor of Matt Damon. And I don't know where the Academy voters came up with a Best Supporting Actress nomination for Samantha Morton, who plays one of Emmet's many women. She's got an award-magnet role as a mute, but to my eye she didn't do anything exceptional with it. She easily conveys the character's innocence and sweetness, but that seems to be as much a function of the way her face looks as how it reacts.
Sweet and Lowdown is certainly worth a rental, mainly for Penn's performance, and probably even worth seeing in theaters if you have a dry enough sense of humor. But it's a slight story, a forgettable trifle in the second tier of Woody Allen films. At least it doesn't show Allen pawing some chickie 50 years younger than him.
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