Yes it’s that time of year again There’s a catch though

Yes, it’s that time of year again There’s a catch, though. In this country, seeing the new Woody Allen film is a little like buying a brand-new computer: even as you put your money down, you know it’s out of date. Since the very latest, Small Time Crooks, has already opened in America, what we’re being fobbed off with is, as always, only the second most recent

Yes, it’s that time of year again There’s a catch, though. In this country, seeing the new Woody Allen film is a little like buying a brand-new computer: even as you put your money down, you know it’s out of date. Since the very latest, Small Time Crooks, has already opened in America, what we’re being fobbed off with is, as always, only the second most recent.
That delay may account for the fact that Allen’s films no longer seem quite the unmissable events they used to be; that, and one’s suspicion that age, fatigue and perhaps a more fulfilled private life have conspired to take the edge off his ambition In one sense, his new humility is something of a relief. The cod-Bergmanian solemnity of such failures as Interiors and September risked becoming a joke in itself. Yet there was a period, from Zelig to Husbands and Wives, when Allen’s were among the most ambitious films, whatever the category, made in America.Because Sweet and Lowdown wouldn’t have been possible without the prior example of Zelig, the biography of an imaginary individual, it allows us to measure just how far he has fallen.

Another specimen of his desire to revisit all the classic Hollywood genres (comedy thriller with Manhattan Murder Mystery, gangster movie with Bullets Over Broadway, musical with Everyone Says I Love You – so when a Woody Allen Western?), it belongs to that fairly unloved genre, the jazz biopic. The difference, however, is that like Zelig its hero, Emmett Ray (Sean Penn) – who, we are told, was the second-finest swing guitarist of the 1930s after his own personal hero, Django Reinhardt – never existed.Like every self-respecting jazz musician, Ray has an ego as big as the Ritz He lives hard and he plays hard. He treats his women like so many succulent wads of gum, chewing them up then spitting them out when he’s extracted all the flavour from them. He exploits their passivity as a sounding-board for his own convulsively self-obsessed discourse, abandoning a docile, devoted, literally mute laundress (the touching Samantha Morton, whose incredibly expressive eyes steal every scene from the rest of her face) the moment a ravishing, bitchy journalist (an implausible Uma Thurman) sashays into his life Like Allen, he also has his own trademark idiosyncrasies.

His favourite pastime is taking potshots at rats on city dumps and, whenever he comes over all lonesome and little-boy-lost, he wards off the blue devils by watching freight trains drift past in the night.Many of these details are communicated to us by a handful of expert “witnesses” who interrupt the narrative (just as in Zelig) and of whom the most familiar is Allen himself. They also share Ray’s high opinion of his musicianship, a subject on which I cannot usefully comment, since I’m a classical-music man myself. I feel bound to say, nevertheless, that, given how well publicised Allen’s own music-making has been, I expected a rather more nerve-rackingly intense, more smokily passionate, defence and celebration of jazz (as in Clint Eastwood’s Bird and Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues) than the bland and bluesy doodling that’s mostly served up here.But then, Sweet and Lowdown is itself a doodle. To criticise it for being unamusing (there’s one especially flat-footed slapstick routine involving a mistimed heist that would have been rejected by Abbott and Costello as too knockabout) is awkward as it doesn’t pretend to be unequivocally a comedy.

In fact, pace myself (above), it cannot really be inscribed within any codified genre. That need not have been a problem in itself, except that Allen has failed to transform his potentially liberating release from generic corseting into a genuine virtue. While the narrative meanders from drama to comedy, from melodrama to what might be called melocomedy, one searches in vain for a coherent vision that would fuse these different modes into a persuasive unity of style and content. If the film has a distinctive surface, and a surface is all it is, it’s primarily thanks to the art-deco set design.Beyond these faults of execution there’s a gaping San Andreas Fault of conception, one that, to begin with, I had trouble pinning down.