Robert Altman's charming and unhurried Cookie's Fortune tells a delectable Southern tale closer in spirit to the stories of Flannery O'Connor than the complex social milieu created by Clint Eastwood for his Midnight in the
Garden of Good and Evil. Like that tale, though, there is a single body to
account for. Cookie (Patricia Neal), a widow who lives in her huge house
with an old family friend, Willis (Charles S Dutton), misses her husband
and, after selecting a gun from his cabinet, shoots herself. She is
discovered by her nieces, the conniving, power-obsessed Camille (Glenn
Close) and her dim sister Cora (Julianne Moore), who make the death look
like a murder committed by Willis.
Such a summary does nothing, however, to capture the experience of the
movie. With its creaking door, Cookie's cabinet calls her hauntingly to her
suicide, and it is detail and tone of this nature which are the fabric, not
merely the thread, of Cookie's Fortune. There is a long, langorous early sequence in which Willis walks around the Mississippi village of Holly
Springs and meets most of the characters that will populate the remainder of
the movie, and Altman films this dance without ever explaining who anyone is
or why particular points on the journey may be of significance. A community
of oddballs that know one another intimately, they aren't about to waste
time telling an outsider like us what they know. Although as slowly paced as
the fishing that is the town's favourite pastime, the film expresses the
warmest, happiest sensibility Altman has ever brought to the screen.
Certainly the director's trademark mix of uncomfortable voyeurism and
glancing cynicism are largely absent. And indeed a series of scenes
involving Cora's daughter Emma (Liv Tyler) and the hopeless sherriff deputy
Jason (Chris O'Donnell) verge on the slapstick. More significantly, however,
this is a South with no racist hangups, and the death in the film is related
as a happy expression of free will that no amount of tampering or
interpretation can discolour.
At their worst, the characters are wafer-thin (Lyle Lovett reprises his
baker from Short Cuts, only without any filling whatsoever). But then, Altman has always enjoyed creating types that perform on the fringes of every
scene, and the scenes themselves deliver a deceptively unstructured drama.
Besides, he has once more pulled a fine ensemble cast, in which Patricia
Neal, Glenn Close and the extraordinary Charles S Dutton stand out.
Reviewed by Douglas McCabe
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