Glancing over the
current list of the ten top grossing pictures on roughcut , I noted with pleasure that Cookie's Fortune
had not dropped out of the running, since its appearance there,
however brief, means that the movie has still done better than
Altman's last releases. A prolific film maker--the Internet Movie
Database credits him with 66
titles to date, not taking into account all the episodes he
directed for television series like Maverick and Combat!
--Altman has had dizzying ups and downs in his career since
scoring a huge hit with MASH back in 1970. While Altman has worked in an
incredibly broad range of genres, including the western, science
fiction, and even the musical, many of his films like MASH,
Nashville (1975), A Wedding (1978), and Kansas
City (1996) deal
with a microcosmic cross-sections of American life in different
locales and at different moments in history, snapshots of the
American Scene that will perhaps one day compose a single if not
unified panorama resembling a Robert Rauschenberg construction,
with a bit of the Old West here, a piece of the country music
industry there, a comic strip in one corner and a gangland saga
in another--not to mention a tribute to Van Gogh orbiting
eccentrically around the outer edges of the whole. Cookie's Fortune, set in a small town in the
deep south, Holly Springs, at the present day, adds another piece
to this creation--not a large one, like Nashville or Kansas
City, but a by no means insignificant one, depicting the
crisis which ensues when Cookie (Patricia Neal) an elderly widow
whose best friend is a black man, Willis Richland (Charles
Dutton) living on her property, kills herself and her sister
Camille (Glenn Close) attempts to cover up the suicide.
Some of Altman's later
films like Short Cuts (1993) and Kansas City have a narrative structure that might be
described as parabolic--in a mathematical as much as in a
rhetorical sense--following the trajectory of a series of mobile
characters whose paths cross at various points during the
unfolding of the action, a trajectory that constantly moves away
from its origin like a skyrocket rising into the air only to
return to ground zero at the conclusion. Kansas City commences with the kidnapping of
Carolyn Stilton (Miranda Richardson) by Blondie O'Hara (Jennifer
Jason Leigh), then flashbacks to the ill-advised attempt of
Blondie's husband Johnny (Dermot Mulroney) to rob the black
gambler Sheepshan Red (A.C. Smith), before returning to the
various attempts to free Mrs.Stilton, whose husband Henry
(Michael Murphy) has connections with the Pendergast political
machine and the local mob. But the movie constantly returns to
Blondie's peregrinations through the city over a twenty-four hour
period, concluding when the bloody body of Johnny is deposited on
her front doorstep and Mrs. Stilton flees after shooting her.
Similarly, Cookie's Fortune begins with the local sheriff
and a deputy going on patrol discussing fishing before it follows
Willis on the way home from a bar to Cookie's house, and it comes
to an end with the main characters--including Willis and the
sheriff--all fishing.
But this parabola has two points of
inflection in two complementary scenes placed respectively near
the beginning and towards the end of Cookie's Fortune. In
the first of these, Cookie commits suicide in her bedroom by
shooting herself, covering her head with a pillow as she lies on
the bed. As she makes her preparations for the act, Altman floods
the room with light, burning out the windows and transfiguring
Cookie. In the hands
of a less sensitive director, a scene like this could have been
disastrous, particularly since Patricia Neal is not a young
actress, but as she moves slowly through the room it is as if we
are watching a farewell dance to life, the culminating gesture in
a richly lived existence The second
scene takes place in the town jail where Camille is now
imprisoned as the result of her inept machinations. Imitating
Salome, Camille--who has just staged her adaptation of Wilde's
play at a church--dances through the cell, waving a streamer of
toilet paper instead of seven veils, before falling prostate on
the cot and covering her head with a pillow. Darkness triumphs,
not only in the darkly lit corner of the cell where Camille now
lies but in the action of fleeing from daylight, the antithesis
of Cookie's final act. Clearly, there is a story here, a story of
frustrated desire and unhappiness that partly emerges when it is
revealed that Camille is the real mother of Willis's ally Emma
(Liv Tyler), but Altman only alludes to this story as he does in MASH
in the shot of the crazed Major Frank Burns (Robert Duvall) being
taken off to a psychiatric ward. But this is Cookie's fortune,
not Camille's misfortune.
More than anything else, Cookie's
Fortune is a complementary piece to Kansas City. The crisis
in the latter film is almost farcically precipitated, when
Johnny, grotesquely disguised in blackface, robs Sheepshan. But
farce turns into bloody catastrophe at the end of Kansas City,
and the events of the past twenty-four hours will be quickly
effaced from the memories of the Stiltons. In Cookie's
Fortune, what
could have been a tragic turn of events, the wrongful accusation
of murder against Willis--a crisis involving blacks and whites
like that in Kansas City--is not only averted but
transformed into high comedy, another episode in the collective
saga of Holly Springs that is destined to become a part of the
characters' lives rather than being banished from memory.