Cookie's
Fortune
Rated PG-13
Opens Friday, April 9
http://www.octoberfilms.com/cookiesfortune/index.html
Sometimes Robert Altman seems more like
an observer than a movie director. His best films--Nashville,
The Long Goodbye, McCabe and Mrs. Miller and
Short Cuts--are restless, refreshing mosaics motivated
by his fascination with human emotion. Altman's approach,
casual and loose, abandons traditional narrative structure
and allows him to capture moments of human interaction and
idiosyncratic behavior--a rarity in a medium that usually
binds character motivation to plot.
Perhaps more than any other contemporary director, Altman
captures the feeling of real time, requiring of his audience
both attentiveness and a willingness to sit back at times
and simply soak up the atmosphere. His critics call this
improvisational method unfocused and self-indulgent, but
they fail to realize that its democratic nature allows the
viewer not only to watch the film, but to participate in
it as well.
In the late stages of his career, the director has again
turned his vision toward the South, a region whose colorful
eccentricity and laid-back informality comfortably suit
Altman's aesthetic. Last year he set The Gingerbread
Man in Savannah, Ga., infusing his cynical mystery with
Southern Gothic morals. His latest, Cookie's Fortune,
leisurely moves even deeper into the South--to Holly Springs,
Miss.--as Altman brings his large-canvas mentality to small-town
America. The results, while hardly groundbreaking and occasionally
scatterbrained, show a veteran craftsman calmly, independently
making movies by his own rules.
In many ways, Cookie's Fortune is the funnier, breezier
sister of The Gingerbread Man. Both films are crowded
Altman ensemble tapestries that examine strict Southern
codes of family honor, tradition and manners. The main difference
between the two is that Altman shows unabashed affection
for the colorful characters (save one) that populate Holly
Springs. For the first hour of the film, Anne Rapp's script
doesn't give them very much to do, and Altman doesn't seem
to care. At one point, one of Altman's trademark zooms lands
on a landmark sign that reads "On this site in 1897, nothing
happened." One hundred years later, the sign still ain't
lying. Some people drunkenly wander deserted streets at
closing time, the cops talk about the finer points of fishing,
and over at the town church several prominent citizens rehearse
for an embarrassing amateur church production of Oscar Wilde's
Salome. Eventually, Altman assembles the randomness
into a coherent social order.
The film focuses on the secrets of the town's oddball matriarchy
and various peripheral characters. Cookie (Patricia Neal),
a widowed kook, is atop the pecking order. Under Cookie
are her nieces, Camille (the dominant director and diva
of Salome, played by Glenn Close) and Cora (Julianne
Moore), a submissive, brain-dead innocent. Cora's free-spirited,
exiled daughter Emma (Liv Tyler, who plays white trash genuinely)
is on the bottom rung, but she has more brains and character
than her three relatives combined.
An air of surprising, almost traditional sweetness--an
uncommon sentiment in an Altman film--hovers over Cookie's
Fortune. But the director, playfully undisciplined at
age 74, continues to stubbornly reject the conventions of
the "well-made" film. While the first half of Cookie's
Fortune could be categorized as a plotless comedy of
manners, the second half is a murder mystery with neither
a murder nor a mystery. The victim dies on-screen, and Altman
spends the remainder of the film self-consciously mocking
traditional rules of the mystery genre. The cause of the
death doesn't interest Altman as much as the effects it
has on the residents of Holly Springs. Mirroring the theatrical
church production of Salome, Altman cleverly depicts
a small town so bored and bound by notions of disgrace and
reputation that one of its most respected citizens creates
a murder out of a suicide. Suspense and tension take a back
seat to nearly surreal scenes of a cop (Altman veteran Ned
Beatty) playing Scrabble and talking fishin' inside the
jail cell with the main suspect. The director ignores tired
clichés and looks for spontaneous energy elsewhere.
It's the same type of genre subversion Altman has executed
repeatedly since he gained notoriety with M*A*S*H.
But now, as he heads into his fifth decade of filmmaking,
it's still inspirational to see the old man giving the finger
to customary expectations and doing things on his own terms.
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Willamette Week | originally
published April 7,
1999
|
