Cookie Orcutt (Patricia Neal) is a lonely old white lady who putters around her Deep South mansion in the company of a black handyman named Willis Richland (Charles Dutton). The two of them appear to have a genuinely caring and mutually beneficial relationship. She doesn't boss him around, but he insists on doing little things for her, such as cleaning the collection of guns that belonged to her long dead husband Buck. Then her niece Emma (Liv Tyler) delivers the line, the line that aristocratic whites are forever casually flinging at the blacks who do all the important work around their houses: "You know you're family," she says.

For a few moments, we may suspect that Robert Altman intends to plunge us into a tedious tale of the hunky-doree race relations between rich whites and hard-working blacks. American moviegoers are suckers for pronouncing a film 'heartwarming' whenever it features a wealthy person who knows how to treat the help with something resembling respect. But Willis Richland isn't the help; he really is family. And Cookie Orcutt is no Miss Daisy; she is a woman who is cheerfully resolved to shoot herself through the face with one of her dead husband's freshly cleaned guns.

Make no mistake: there is rampant cornballism in Cookie's Fortune. But Altman has rather brilliantly decided to have the script and his own direction trade cornball moments with one another. When the script is silly, the direction is perfect; and when the script is flawless, the direction becomes silly. In lesser hands than Altman's, the protracted opening sequence involving the seeming theft but eventual return of a bottle of bourbon by Willis would have come across as nothing less than cheesy. But Altman's detached camera work and profoundly satisfying integration of a rip-roaringly good blues soundtrack enables us to put up with a facile celebration of honesty that could have been written by Parson Weems himself.

We also have a bit of commentary on how that yellow police tape that we aren't supposed to cross tends to make crime scenes more enticing to us than they would be in the absence of the tape. This notion of being drawn to what is forbidden could have been irritating, but actually becomes sort of amusing when we see the winsome Emma Duvall, who is tangled up in the yellow tape, throwing herself into the carnal embrace of Deputy Jason Brown (Chris O'Donnell). If Altman didn't have such an incredible knack for viewing the world with detachment (in much the same way that Raymond Carver does), then the scene with the tape would be insufferably cute. But he manages to make it wry instead.

Even more interesting is the fact that the villainess of the movie is a director named Camille Dixon (Glenn Close), who is in the habit of attempting to impose her own sinister and self-serving perspective on her productions. She is unapologetic about having rewritten Oscar Wilde's Salome for a local church performance and sees the cover-up of her sister's suicide as nothing more than a theatrical production that requires her to assign certain lines and cues to her other sister, a halfwit named Cora (played brilliantly by Julianne Moore). Unfortunately for Camille, her self-serving attempt to preserve the Dixon family name from the taint of suicide results in her being tried for the murder of her own sister. And the words that she coached Cora to say turn out to be the most damning evidence against her. It is really almost as if Altman (as a director who is sometimes faulted for becoming too detached from--or even contemptuous of--the characters in his films) is trying to teach himself a lesson about what happens to directors who refuse to allow their actors to realize their own creative vision.

There are so many good things about this film, including Lyle Lovett's performance as a fish-gutter fixated on Emma Duvall, that it really is difficult to say where the film is strongest. But I really think we have to give extremely high marks to Glenn Close for her portrayal of Camille. I've never heard anyone from Connecticut deliver such a convincing Southern accent, and she's particularly adept at finding her character in the scene in which her character discusses the method she used to find her way into the character of a murderer who never existed.

However, as strong as Close's performance is, one hates to overlook the performances of Charles Dutton (as the wrongly accused Willis) and Ned Beatty (as the deputy who refuses to believe that Willis could have committed murder simply because the two of them have gone fishing together). If it weren't for such plodding moments as when Camille is literally caught with her hand in a cookie jar (a tableau already thoroughly skewered by mangiotto) and the clumsy burgeoning romance between an outside investigator and the clerk at the local police station, I would say that Cookie's Fortune is as good a film as we're likely to see. It's better than four stars, but just shy of my highest recommendation.

But before you sit down to watch it, I urge you to prepare catfish enchiladas instead of popcorn. Trust me on this one.







Recommended: Yes