6) Hattie in Sweet and Lowdown
Woody Allen has produced so much work that a lot of it inevitably gets overlooked. You think of Woody and you think of Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and then his revival period with movies like Match Point and Midnight in Paris. But he’s literally made a movie almost every year since the 70s, and so movies like Sweet and Lowdown can get lost in the shuffle. And that’s too bad because it, and so many others considered “minor” Woody Allen, is awesome.
One of the best parts of Sweet and Lowdown is the character of Hattie, played by Samantha Morton, probably most famous for being the pre-cog girl in Minority Report. She doesn’t say much in that one, but in Sweet and Lowdown she is literally mute. The key, though, is that she can hear, and so she falls in love with the Sean Penn jazz musician character Emmet.
She got an Oscar nomination and tons of acclaim because she was another character who reminded people of the days of silent movie actors, who had to be interesting without saying anything, which meant lots of facial reactions to things, lots of personality expressed physically, and charm captured completely through their eyes. There’s something magical just about the way she looks at Emmet that is reminiscent of how much people in real life can show about themselves simply through the act of looking. It’s remarkable.
