Cookie's Fortune Reviewed

ROVIN' AND RAVIN' WITH MIKE

The Unofficial Official Peanut.org Movie

Cookie's Fortune

So, we’ve swept up the empty envelopes after the Academy Awards, but may it please the faithful readers, it pleases me to announce the first Unofficial Official Peanut.org Movie, and the honors go to Cookie’s Fortune.

Magnificent performances, wonderful music, a scintillating script, the touch of a master director—this is what movies are all about. Let everyone say a-men… and a-women, too.

The first five or ten minutes of Cookie's Fortune are worth the cost of admission, with Ruby Wilson’s gut-wrenching blues in the background as we plunge into life in Holly Springs, Mississippi on all sides of the tracks. A bottle of whiskey is shoplifted, but it turns out not to be a shoplifting. A man breaks into perhaps the largest house in town, where he is greeted warmly. There may be a peeping tom at the back of a van a girl is living in, but he isn’t a peeping tom. The main point of the plot is a murder which isn’t a murder, and running through the whole film are the ongoing rehearsals for a ludicrous church play, a reworking of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, which, of course, is not a church play.

Like his great Nashville (1975), this newest work by director Robert Altman celebrates a town, its various communities, and its music. In this case, the music is the blues, thanks to composer David Ferry and performers Rufus Thomas and Ruby Wilson, whose character assures us that "Wild women don’t get the blues," one of many great lines in this premiere script by Anne Rapp.

To put all this together, summarizing what will be no secret to you soon into the movie, Holly Springs comes to life in the suicide of Cookie Orcutt, a role with which Patricia Neal stakes her claim to this movie in just a few minutes on screen. Her nieces Camille (Glenn Close) and Cora (Julianne Moore) find her body, and to avoid the shame of having a suicide in the family, unintentionally implicate Willis, Cookie’s friend and unlikely guardian angel, and then set out to drive the whole sheriff’s department nuts. If there is any value at all to the Academy Awards, Patricia Neal is assured a nomination for Best Supporting Actress, and Charles Dutton an Oscar for Best Actor. Great performances like these are what legends are made of, including the legend of Robert Altman as a director who guides, challenges, and frees performers to do their best. And it’s a further indication of the greatness of the performances by Neal and Dutton that even the elegant, somewhat over-the-top turns of Close and Moore are overshadowed.

Don’t worry, lads and lassies, there are two splendid performances by the young. Liv Tyler (daughter of Arrowsmith’s Steven Tyler) plays Emma, Cookie’s great-niece and holder of the town’s record for parking tickets, and Chris O’Donnell plays a bumbling deputy (a young Barney Fife?) stuck in the dreadful play out of love for Emma. Lyle Lovett adds to his growing list of small, exquisitely developed roles, as the deputy’s rival. Ned Beatty, who contributed to Nashville joins with Altman again, this time as the sheriff, who trusts his heart and his instincts more than he trusts the evidence.

Since I have been writing these columns, I have gradually evolved a theory about, perhaps a justification for my reviews. I am not so much in the business of saying a film is good or bad as I am of trying to enrich your experience of a film. After you read a review of mine, I hope you might like a little less a film you are enthusiastic about or dislike a little less a film that you can’t stand.

But, this time out, I have to scratch around for some quibbles with this film. It’s no surprise that Willis escapes the electric chair, although he has a few memorable days of imprisonment and Scrabble victories, but the resolution of the plot, that someone ends up in jail, is not as satisfying as the film seems to want it to be. The play is a droll foil to the story of the film. Toward the end, however, with Roman soldiers storming into the jail, things get a little weird. But, perhaps they are no weirder than they need to be. After all this is a comedy, celebrating the strength and heart of a little old southern town which just might remind you of some place we know and love, even though, as far as we know, it does not have its state’s first and only community free-net.

The final resolution of the plot dissolves into contrivance, but by then, who cares? With all these crazy ladies, strong-willed ladies, manless ladies, there is a whiff of Fried Green Magnolias or Steel Tomatoes, but this is not a chick flick, ending as it does with four good old boys—although one is black, and one is a young woman—fishing together. And there, that’s a good place to leave them, swapping yarns, and putting the pieces together. So pass the Wild Turkey, and do give us the recipe for those mysterious catfish enchiladas that almost become characters. This time, I would suggest you look at the official (that is, the studio’s) website for this film, because there is a lot of information packed in there.

Now, some final, personal words about the lady who graces the beginning of this film, Patricia Neal. A friend of mine who was an extra in the 1965 In Harm’s Way, in which Otto Preminger paired, one might say, balanced Neal and John Wayne, says that she was "the sweetest lady you could ever want to meet, more like everyone’s mom than like a Movie Star."

My words on Patricia Neal are not so personal. In 1968, I saw her in Ulu Grosbard’s The Subject Was Roses. Although that somewhat wooden transfer of a stage play, a domestic meller-drammer, didn’t much speak to my late sixties’ rebelliousness, I owe that film and its leading lady a great debt. It was The Subject Was Roses and Patricia Neal’s performance in it that convinced me that an actor, specifically, an actress, is not just a puppet. Patricia Neal made quite an impression on me, teaching me in this performance quite a lot about performance. This performance made even more of an impression upon me when I later found out that this was her return to the screen after a series of strokes in 1966 that almost killed her and left her paralyzed and mute for some time.

She and her husband have become outspoken crusaders for those who suffer strokes. Drawing on their own experiences, they have developed a form of rehabilitation that has been accepted by the medical community around the world. Her name is immortalized on the Patricia Neal Rehabilitation Center in her hometown of Knoxville, Tennessee.

But, for those of us who love movies, the name of Patricia Neal is also immoralized on a few good movies. She has not given us many, but any project she has associated her name with has been marked by grace and elegance. Even in the brief current role, she brings humor, class, a certain sense of fulfillment—that this role could not have been performed better by anyone else. So, this week I ask my readers to join me in dedicating our dry feet and the noble thoughts with which our hearts are full to humanitarian and artist Patricia Neal. She is, as the fishing buddies in this movie might say, "a keeper."