The 45-year-old Robert Altman came from nowhere to win the 1970 Palme d'Or with M*A*S*H and was a dominant figure throughout the decade. His cynical, freewheeling movies with large ensemble casts, multi-soundtracks and imaginative use of the widescreen questioned American values and turned established genres such as the western and the crime movie upside down. Hardly any of them made money and in the Eighties he worked on a chamber scale, mostly filming plays with small casts on single sets. In the Nineties he returned to his expansive mode with mixed results that ranged from the excellent Short Cuts to the abysmal Prêt-à-Porter. In Cookie's Fortune, the 74-year-old Altman has yoked the large ensemble to an essentially intimate piece that is mellow without being sentimental.
Had Anne Rapp, the author of the original screenplay, been obliged to pitch the film to a producer in a sentence, she would have suggested something rather different from what ended up on the screen. 'Innocent middle-aged black servant arrested for murder of white woman in small Mississippi town; sophisticated black homicide detective investigates' sounds like a reworking of In The Heat of the Night. 'Crazy lady with dark secret, obsessed by family pride and eager to inherit a fortune, makes the suicide of her geriatric aunt look like murder' suggests a Robert Aldrich shocker such as Baby Jane or Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte. The film is in fact neither a thriller in any normal sense nor a melodramatic slice of Southern gothic.
The whole picture takes place over an Easter weekend, and a leisurely first 35 minutes, occupying a night and the following morning, is taken setting up the characters and inviting us to infer the relationships between them. Most of them are rehearsing a credibly inept production of Salomé, to be presented on Easter Monday before an all-white audience at the Presbyterian Church.
The director is the batty Camille Dixon (Glenn Close) who takes a joint credit as author ('I'm partial to Oscar Wilde's play, but I did revise it a little') and has cast in the title role her sister (Julianne Moore), who's clearly a couple of catfish short of a fish-fry. Meanwhile, Willis (Charles S. Dutton), the middle-aged black, appears at first to be a thief and a drunk, but is soon revealed as a man of scrupulous honour, devoted to Cookie (Patricia Neal), an elderly, once beautiful widow. There is never any mystery about her suicide, which occurs after she's planted the Easter eggs in her garden, and there is more madness than malice in Camille's cover-up.
Certainly she had no intention of framing Willis for murder. The local deputy sheriff (Ned Beatty) is convinced of Willis's innocence: 'Because I went fishing with him.' And as we are aware of the evidence that will free him we can sit back and enjoy the richly Faulknerian scene in which Willis, his lawyer (Donald Moffatt) and the deputy sheriff play Scrabble together in a prison cell. Also in the cell is Emma (Liv Tyler), the town's golden-hearted bad girl, who insists on being arrested for her parking offences to show solidarity with Willis. Altman handles the material with the lightest of touches and never overdoes the parallels with Salomé. Cookie's Fortune is certainly his best exercise in storytelling, with the revelations neatly placed. The cast is excellent and there are endless lovely touches such as the black woman cop discreetly undoing the top buttons of her uniform shirt to compete with the canyon-like décolletage of the honkytonk singer being interrogated by a handsome black detective (Courtney B. Vance).
The movie is warmer than anything Altman has made before and while it appears to be about a dysfunctional family, the satisfying pay-off is a celebration of family ties in wide, deep, unexpected ways.
