Robert J. Maxwell I must say this ensemble effort doesn't begin too promisingly -- another glimpse of oddity in a small Southern town, people with names like Jewel Mae and Otis and Lester, something along the lines of Beth Henley's "Crimes of the Heart," which couldn't be saved even by my own sterling performance.And it is a little casual in establishing its characters. One wonders where the hell it intends going. Patricia Neal does a fine job with the role of the decrepit old "Cookie" Orcutt in the opening scenes. Neal is old but not THAT old and the talent behind the performance still glows under the crusted patina. But then so does everyone else's, and it's a good cast.Basically the plot is thus: Cookie, knowing she'll join her husband in heaven, cheerfully shoots herself in the head. Two younger cousins -- the too-clever Glenn Close and the exceedingly dumb Julianne Moore -- discover the body and decide to make it look like a murder, suicide being too much of a disgrace for the family to bear.Then the plot gets off the ground in its casual, laid-back, Mississippian way, kinda like a sleepy dog rousin' itself to slink off the dusty road so the universal harvester can chug past. It's too twisted to detail but there were several times I laughed out loud. "Crimes of the Heart" only got one laugh.The gags come not just from Anne Rapp's screenplay but from Altman's direction as well. A semi-serious criminal interrogation goes on in the foreground while in the background two officers marvel at the dimensions of a stuffed catfish on the wall. Glenn Close manages to be caught with her hand in the cookie jar -- literally.I won't go on about it. It's a relaxing and amusing fairy tale.

Andrew Ray Throughout the long trajectory of his career, Robert Altman was known for interweaving multiple plots and characters within the context of a given theme. Think the brotherhood of the country music community in "Nashville" or the detachment of contemporary California life in "Short Cuts." But in 1999, Altman tried something a bit unique – he directed a motion picture with a plot. One plot. One story. A comparatively small cast of characters. It was called, "Cookie's Fortune," and it's this month's Buried Treasure.With a clever screenplay by Anne Rapp, "Cookie's Fortune" tells the story of Willis (Charles S. Dutton), a handyman wrongly accused of murder in a small Mississippi town. His widowed employer (Patricia Neal) commits suicide at the outset, and her daughters decide to disguise the shooting as a murder in a vain attempt to preserve the family's reputation. Since Willis had just cleaned the widow's guns the night before, his fingerprints are all over them. And there you have the most plot structure you'll ever find in an Altman film.What follows this sullen and morose setup is Altman's funniest picture since "M*A*S*H" in 1970. You see, everyone in the town knows Willis couldn't possibly commit murder. The jailer (a young Chris O'Donnell) consistently leaves the cell door open, and the sheriff (a fantastic Ned Beatty) plays cards with him – in the cell! You see, Beatty's character knows Willis is innocent because, "I've fished with him" – which seems to be his quintessence test for everyone he knows.But, as in every Altman film, there's one character who doesn't quite fit. One who takes things more seriously than the others. Remember how pathetically dangerous Robert Duvall's Major Frank Burns seemed in "M*A*S*H" (as opposed to the maniacal buffoon Larry Linville played on the long-running television series)? It was as though the Major Burns character walked on the set from another movie – just to give the audience a jolt; to let us know this is war, and war is real.In "Cookie's Fortune," Glenn Close plays Camille, the theatrical and mildly deranged daughter of the deceased – a slightly more comical version of her wicked turn in "Fatal Attraction." Camille is the smartest character in the picture, but she's also the one who doesn't belong; the one who, in a panic attack, might just turn this lovable comedy into a dreary exercise in unhinged madness. Fortunately, Altman is a skilled enough director to not allow this to happen, but my does he dangle it closely (pun intended). Had Glenn Close played her role ever so slightly more unsettled, the entire film would have been ruined. Altman walks a fine line allowing Camille to exaggerate her pomposity, but then her function seems to be to remind us that this is murder, and murder is real.Still, Altman never loses sight of the fact that "Cookie's Fortune" is a comedy, dark though it may be. The script is peppered with well-drawn characters, and the acting is first-rate – particularly Ned Beatty as the sheriff, and also Liv Tyler as Camille's desperado niece, whose boyfriend just so happens to be Chris O'Donnell's maladroit jailer. Altman is a master handling these intertwining characters, as he doles out information in small enough doses for us to completely process their connections, and for us to understand the soul of the town in which they regale.Unfortunately, "Cookie's Fortune" was released during the spring doldrums – that period between the Oscars and the summer blockbusters, when the studios trot out the fare they don't think anyone will pay to see. By the time the Oscars rolled around that year, the talk was all about "Magnolia," "American Beauty," "The Cider House Rules," and "The Green Mile." "Cookie's Fortune" was simply a forgotten footnote to American cinema in 1999. And that's a shame. You need to seek out this one. It's funny, touching, and intelligent – and easily one of Robert Altman's ten best films.

Rockwell_Cronenberg Cookie's Fortune is another ensemble character piece from Robert Altman, although it's of a lot less magnitude than some of his previous works. The story centers around a group of citizens in the quaint town of Holly Springs, who are thrown into disarray by the sudden death of Cookie Orcutt (Patricia Neal). Altman's scope is much more intimate than some of his other ensemble pieces, and it fits the characters nicely. The whole thing, accompanied by a nice blues score, has this quaint and relaxed atmosphere to it. This makes the film move by at a slower pace, but I never really felt like it dragged or anything, it just sort of coasted along.There are several characters that we focus on, from Cookie's nieces Camille and Cora (Glenn Close and Julianne Moore) to her best friend Willis (Charles S. Dutton) to the police (Chris O'Donnell, Ned Beatty and a few others) to Cora's estranged daughter Emma (Liv Tyler), who has coincidentally just strolled back into town after being gone for a while. Cookie's death sends waves through the small community and turns everyone's situations upside down, resulting in comedic strides and a police investigation. When focusing on the individual characters, I definitely enjoyed myself most of the time, especially when it came to the erratic and revoltingly vain Camille (played with utter theatrical delight by Close) and the eternally laid-back Willis, but I don't think the script managed to bring the characters together in an entirely fluid manner.This especially became a problem when the film was focused on Camille and Cora, who felt as though they were in an entirely different film. The majority of it had that bluesy, Southern atmosphere to it but then you get to the scenes with the two of them and it's like they're in a Tennesse Williams play. The characters are supposed to be a contrast to the rest of the ensemble, but the tones of their sections don't mesh at all with the rest of the film and it's quite distracting. The cast for the most part does a fine job, Close being the only one who impressed me on any major level, but Tyler and O'Donnell stick out like sore thumbs, the flattest pieces of wood in an otherwise quite alive ensemble.I think my main problem with it though came from the final act, which is just a bizarre disaster. Out of nowhere the investigation starts turning up revelations of different familial bonds and lies from the past, but they truly come out of nowhere and ultimately add nothing to the film. It gets so confusing and incoherent in the final act, I don't have a clue what possessed writer Anne Rapp. It drags the film down considerably, but the rest of it was alright, if relatively insignificant.

evanston_dad In the late 1990s, Robert Altman directed a series of films set in the South, all of them with Southern Gothic elements. "Kansas City" and "The Gingerbread Man" were throwbacks to the crime thriller film noir, while "Cookie's Fortune" was a mostly comic yarn about the suicide of a beloved widow in a small Mississippi town and the efforts of the local police department to solve the "crime" when it's re-staged to look like a murder. The tone of "Cookie's Fortune" is like that of William Faulkner when he was writing books like "The Reivers." If the film seems to have nowhere to go and takes its time getting there, that's not necessarily a criticism. That's part of the Southern tall-tale culture, and if you've ever spent time in that part of the country, you know what it's like to sit on a porch, drinking overly sweetened iced tea, and listen to colorful characters take 20 minutes to tell a story that could be told in 5.The cast includes Patricia Neal (Cookie) and Charles S. Dutton, as the widow and the chief suspect accused in her apparent murder; Glenn Close, in an overwrought performance as a relative of Cookie who wants to cover up Cookie's suicide so as not to tarnish the family name and get her hands on Cookie's fortune in the process; and Julianne Moore as Close's mentally slow sister who ends up not being quite as slow as we thought by the time the movie's over. There are also parts for Liv Tyler, Chris O'Donnell, Ned Beatty and a completely unnecessary Lyle Lovett. The fortune of the film's title is a red herring that would have made Alfred Hitchcock proud, and the investigation itself fades into the background as the characters become the point of interest. As he would show in his all-out murder mystery from two years later, "Gosford Park", Altman isn't nearly as interested in the destination as he is the journey to it.Grade: B+