April 8–15, 1999

movie shorts

Cookie's Fortune

by Sam Adams

Directed by Robert Altman
An October Films release

recommended

A Southern Gothic with the accent on Southern, Cookie's Fortune is a front-porch story told at its own pace, a laconic, unhurried tale where the joy is in the telling. In his 42nd year of moviemaking, Robert Altman has the assurance and the grace to take pleasure in the details, and the confidence that the audience will follow his lead.

With Cookie's Fortune, Altman is proven right, but just barely. Even a front-porch story has to have a point, and nearly half the film is gone before the plot swings into action. We're introduced to the elderly Cookie Orcutt (Patricia Neal) and the score of characters who make Holly Springs, Texas, their home. There are Cookie's nieces, the imperious, melodramatic Camille (Glenn Close) and her "simple" sister Cora (Julianne Moore), Cora's notorious daughter Emma (Liv Tyler) and her sometime boyfriend and dimwitted deputy Jason (Chris O'Donnell). And at the center of it all is Willis (Charles Dutton), Cookie's caretaker and best friend, a slow-moving type who never steals a bottle of Wild Turkey without replacing it the next day.

Cookie's Fortune spends three quarters of an hour laying out the relationships between these characters and a dozen others in novelistic detail, so that when Holly Springs begins to turn upside down, we know exactly what the status quo is, and how it's being disturbed. The propulsive event is a death Camille and Cora act hastily to disguise, inadvertently indicating Willis as the chief suspect. Camille, a small-town diva who stages lurid, DeMillian pageants for the local church, is overtly motivated by a desire to protect her family's honor, but the unsteady, desperate glint in Close's eyes leaves no doubt that what Camille really wants is drama, a whodunit in which she is the central figure.

Drama she gets, all right, as Willis is thrown in jail and a pair of outside investigators come into quiet Holly Springs in the hopes of solving the crime. Otis Tucker (Courtney B. Vance) is especially welcome, because his arrival gives the movie a jolt it sorely needs. Perhaps it's that the investigation gives Cookie's Fortune the framework it's been lacking, or that Tucker's city mouse/country mouse frustration mirrors our own; with too many characters, the only question is whether they're as dumb as a box of rocks or a bag of hammers. At one point, Camille and Cora show up to "redecorate" the crime scene, and all Deputy Jason can do is stand around and stammer as they gather yellow tape into neat little balls.

Still, it's clear that Cookie's Fortune is exactly as Altman wants it, if not always why he wants it that way. At times, the film seems so low-pressure and offhand it barely exists, but what Altman is offering here is flavor, not substance. True, like the characters of Nashville or Short Cuts, the fine folks of Holly Springs get themselves into and out of messes with alarming regularity, but Altman trades the satirist's sharp-edged laughter for the humanist's gentle chuckle. Instead of pinning his characters down with merciless wit, he's merely smiling at their human foibles: Lord, what fools these Texans be!

Indeed, if there's a lesson to Cookie's Fortune, it might be "Don't overdo it." The villain of the piece is clearly Camille, who with her vainglorious pageants ("Salome, by Oscar Wilde and Camille Dixon," reads the sign) and Norma Desmond glare, can't resist the chance to elevate each plot twist into a catastrophe of global proportions. Her opposite is the town's chief of police, played with fleshy solidity by Ned Beatty, who tells a slackjawed Tucker that he knows Willis is innocent because, he explains, "We fished together." In the end, the histrionic diva pays the price for her melodramatic ways, and Holly Springs returns to the way it always was. When we last see them, the characters are gathered on a lazy afternoon, talking, relaxing and—what else?—fishing.