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But I suspect when I look back on "Sweet and Lowdown" in 10 years' time, I'll remember it as belonging solely to Morton. She's the stealth actress of the late '90s: Her leading role in Carine Adler's 1997 "Under the Skin" burrowed deeply into the desperation of mourning and miscued sexuality, and her astonishingly tender and bold performance in another English film, this year's "Dreaming of Joseph Lees," suggests that she's only just begun to tap her resources. According to London Time Out, when Allen offered her the role of Hattie, she insisted on reading the whole script (Allen is known for allowing actors to read only their own lines), claiming that she had several offers and wanted to have a good idea of the project before she took it on. You could call it youthful hubris -- how dare a 22-year-old actress question an ancient, wise, alleged genius? Aside from the fact that Allen's modus operandi is embarrassingly egotistical anyway, when you see Morton's performance, you understand that an actress of her caliber and dedication would have every right to insist on seeing the whole script.

To Allen's credit, he allowed it, and it's a good thing, too. A mute laundress? Could any character sound more sickly and unappealing from that description? But in Morton's hands, the character is a revelation. With her quiet expressiveness she conjures both the glowing presence of great silent-film actresses like Lillian Gish and the crushing vulnerability of Giulietta Masina. And what catches you is that she's most heartbreaking in her happiest moments, not her most crestfallen ones. She's a hearty eater, tucking into her food with so much gusto that you're left with no doubt that a simple doughnut must be the staff of life. Her comic turns are amazing: After spending a day on a movie set being kissed into a trance by a handsome older actor, she stumbles into a pane of plate glass, and her pratfall is both delicate and clumsy, a touch of real genius in terms of its physicality.

But it's her face that really gets you. When she first appears, wearing a middy blouse and a striped hat crunched down over her curly bob, she looks barely 15. As you watch her, though, her elfin features take on an almost ageless radiance. She asks the deepest questions with her eyes alone; her crescent-moon smile lights up her whole face. If her character is set up to be the unwitting receptacle for Emmet Ray's macho cluelessness ("This is my one day off, I want a talking girl," he announces just after they meet), she trumps him in the end. The sensitivity you hear in his guitar is incomplete because it seems to come from nowhere close to his heart; but it plays out on her face, and that's where it finds its meaning. When she hears him playing for the first time -- they've just made love and she's busy hopping back into her comically baggy undergarments -- she stops short, transfixed. It's clear the sound is like nothing she's ever heard, but its beauty hardly compares with the sense of creeping wonder that steals over her face, like a morning glory opening in stop-time.

Like nothing I've ever seen, that instant represents the transformative powers of music, its ability to change you imperceptibly from the inside before you even realize what's happening. And yet as Morton plays that scene, she turns it into something even more than a testament to the power of a few simple notes. She's a metaphor for the idea that even for the most brilliant musician, it's the listener who completes the equation. Morton is music you can see.
salon.com | Dec. 3, 1999

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