Cookie's Fortune
Directed by Robert Altman
Holly Springs, Mississippi. A sleepy, laid-back Southern town. Imagine Faulkner without the racism, violence and moral anguish. Or Mayberry populated by real people, even some black ones, people who drink and screw and sing the blues and blow off their parking tickets. A town in which ethics and the meaning of life are found in fishing. This is the setting, and the subject, of Robert Altman's gentle new comedy Cookie's Fortune.
It is Easter Weekend and the tranquillity of Holly Springs is suddenly disturbed by a suicide disguised as a murder. The investigation that follows delves as much into the soul of the town as the supposed crime, and we eventually discover how complicated and convoluted the relationships among the characters are.
The strengths of the movie lie in the depth of these characters and the wonderful ensemble performance of the all-star cast. Despite the familiarity of the faces and the glamor of the names, we easily forget that we are watching actors, seeing them instead as the complex and fascinating characters they represent.
Patricia Neal plays the town's matriarch, "Cookie," a pipe-smoking old woman who tends her garden, hides Easter eggs, misses her deceased husband Buck and spends her best hours reminiscing with Willis, the black caretaker of her estate.
Charles S. Dutton delivers Willis as a man of depth and passion, who plays Scrabble and quotes Greek mythology, and who likes his whiskey but likes his honor more and likes nothing better than fishing. We feel his kindness and honest affection for the people close to him, and we share his shock, horror and grief at the death of his close friend.
Glenn Close, no stranger to playing an obsessive woman, portrays Cookie's niece Camille, an affectatious spinster who drives a rusty yellow coupe but dreams of better things. She is aggressive and domineering whether she is conniving how she will inherit her aunt's house and fortune, busting through a barrier of police tape or directing the Easter drama at the Presbyterian church -- an edited version of Oscar Wilde's Salome for which Camille claims co-writing credit.
Directing the play affords Camille the opportunity not only to dominate her pretty, but simple minded sister Cora (Julianne Moore), but some of the town's finest citizens as well, including a venerable town lawyer who rides a bicycle (Donald Moffat) and an eager, but inept, rookie sheriff's deputy named Jason (Chris O'Donnell).
Jason, we discover, has the hots for Cora's estranged and rebellious daughter, Emma (Liv Tyler) who, in turn, barely speaks to him but is always ready for a fast, hard kiss or a spontaneous quickie in the semi-privacy of the police station. All this occurs much to the chagrin of Emma's employer Manny, the creepy, leering fishery proprietor, played with deadpan lechery by Lyle Lovett.
Perhaps the most interesting character, though, is Cora. We never find out exactly what her problem is, why she is so meek and passive, unable to resist going along with everything Camille tells her, or why her own personality only seems to emerge when she is on the stage reading other people's words. But her manner changes from a confused ditziness to a confident luminescence when she dons her Salome costume, and we are left with the impression that for once she is ready to live her own life and make her own decisions. Julianne Moore's performance, much like the film, is a wonder of subtlety and understatement.
Robert Altman's direction follows the same slow, lazy pace as the life of the town. He uses a much lighter touch here than usual. He unfolds scenes and events slowly, constantly toying with the cynical preconceptions we have developed from a steady diet of fast-paced comedies, special effects disasters and violent crime thrillers. Like the urban detective called in to investigate the murder, we are always looking for the town's dark underside and we are repeatedly surprised to find that it doesn't exist. By the time the secrets are uncovered and the skeletons brought out of the closet, we find that they don't much matter.
Instead, what we discover is how innocent and idyllic this town really is. The town's biggest sinner is Camille and her primary sin is that she doesn't fit in. Unlike everybody else, she is cold, superficial, greedy, selfish and hypocritical. In other words, she is like the rest of the world. Apparently, her problem is she never learned to fish.
I picked a good time to see this movie. I needed a lift. I know that a place like this, a place in which people live together in peace and harmony, in which individual eccentricities are both tolerated and welcome, does not exist in the world we know, even in isolated backwaters. But in our world, the real world, the one in which schoolchildren blow each other away en masse because they can, it's nice to think it could.
Page posted 5/1/99
