From my favorite movies..

A different way of telling a story

It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

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.

"American cinema is a bit like telling bedtime stories to children." - Peter GreenawayRobert Altman typically begins his films by quickly sketching some self-contained environment (military barracks, hospital, dance studio, radio show, rodeo, stately mansion etc). His environment created, Altman then inserts an ensemble cast and lets his actors improvise or create their own roles. His actors in motion, Altman then uses a free floating camera to track various characters and tease out various subplots. Of course all directors do this, but Altman's plots seem particularly ill-defined. There is a sense of an entire world in motion, a world which continues along regardless of where Altman pokes his camera. We, meanwhile, are invited to choose where we look and what we see. And so we float from one seemingly arbitrary nodule to the next, sculpting the film ourselves and stumbling upon bits and pieces of a "story" which we are asked to piece together and make coherent. Altman also typically inserts some symbolic performance-within-the-film. His character's often gather to put on a play, production or show, a kind of self-reflexive model of the film they're in. The play within "Cookie's Fortune" is a performance of Oscar Wilde's "Salome", a tale of seduction, necrophilia, unlawful marriages and dangerous female seductiveness. Why "Salome" was chosen will become apparent to us later on.Jazz music often find its way into Altman's films. His aesthetic style is itself jazz-like, his films structureless, improvisational and constructed around riffs and ripostes. "Cookie's Fortune" itself takes place in a Mississippi town with a strong jazz and blues tradition. Altman populates this town with lovable Southern eccentrics, amongst whom are Cookie (an elderly woman who commits suicide), a local sheriff and his deputies (who do nothing but drive about and talk about fishing), and Camille Dixon, a bossy matriarch who tends to her slow witted sister, Cora Duvall. Other characters include Manny (a lonely fisherman), Emma (a rebellious young woman) and Willis (a kind black man and local drunk). Altman has always been a fairly relaxed film-maker, but "Cookie's Fortune" takes things to new highs (or leisurely lows). The film begins with a easygoing walk, and the film as a whole feelings like one gentle cinematic stroll, Altman casually introducing us to his cast and the film's key locations. Elsewhere the film engages in Altman's love for subversion. Watch how scenes or images traditionally associated with danger are subverted or rendered benign. A black man breaks into a house, for example, but it is then revealed that he knows the owner. A man opens a gun cabinet, but he simply wants to clean the guns. A creepy peeping tom spies on a girl, but he means no harm. And so on and so on. Indeed, the film itself is a satire on the Southern Gothic genre and various Tennesee Williams plays, but Altman's tone is less caustic than usual. He seems to love this community of eccentrics.But there are sinister things lurking about. Watch how Camille Dixon, the director of the play within the film, becomes the God who controls the film's plot and who manipulates the on-screen murder investigation. Surrounded by a sea of inept actors and second rate actresses, she is in control of "Cookie's Fortune" the film, Salome the play, and Cookie's fortune, the literal will and testament of Cookie, a now-deceased elderly woman within the film. As her community bands together outside the Oscar Wilde play, however, Camille begins to lose control whilst they, ironically, begin to gain control of both Altman's film and Wilde's play. This power struggle is epitomised by a character played by actress Julianne Moore, who develops from an incompetent actress to the new star of Salome. She then usurps Camille.Typical of Altman, there's some dark inter-racial, psycho-sexual stuff hidden in the film's margins. In the Salome myth, Salome is the stepdaughter of Herod and dances seductively before Herod and her mother Herodias. Her mother had her with another man, an affair which causes John the Baptist to denounce the mother's marriage to Herod as being unlawful. For spreading what she perceives to be these lies, Salome executes John. In the film, it is implied that Emma's mother isn't her mother and it is her real mother's sister's husband who is her father. With Camille Dixon obsessed with "pride" and "preserving the pride of the family and community", it seems that perhaps she was covering up some affair (or even a murder) with a black guy who "went back to Africa to serve as a missionary" (or jail or on the run). Altman inserts various breadcrumbs for those inclined to search.Elsewhere the film advocates a kind of humble, mixed-race community spirit. A kind of sexual liberation where black and white, upper and lower classes, put things aside and get along. The aristocratic and stuck up Camille Dixon (a haemophiliac – on a symbolic level, her blood refuses to mix with outsiders) belongs to an era which the rebellious Cookie and Emma turned their backs on, one skipping town and getting into trouble, the other literally wearing her humble Mississippi State university sweater to her grave. This kind of warmth was typical of Altman's later films, particularly "Prairie Home Companion".8.5/10 – See Mamet's "State and Main". Worth one viewing.

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+

"Cookie's Fortune" is perhaps the most inane and useless movies I have ever watched. Definitely NOT a watershed event in cinematographic history. On the CZTV website, 21 percent of viewers rated it as "waste of time" whereas 72 percent rated it as "excellent," with almost nothing in between. I don't get it. Do YOU get it? I certainly don't get it. Had this film not have had Liv Tyler in it, I don't think I would have watched it to its pathetic and boring finale. Definitely a lot of material for a future episode of MST3K here. I mean, it takes just as much time/effort/money/etc. to make a good movie as it does to make a movie like this, so why did they even bother producing it? I guess CZTV doesn't have a whole lot of money to buy any good films, so all we get here are reruns of Dallas, and garbage like this. Possibly the only good thing I have to say about this movie is the fact that it doesn't copy the standardised model of most American movies. No helicopters, no explosions, no car chases, and no unrealistically exaggerated characters. In fact, the characters were all too ordinary. Even a video of some guy playing chess on his computer would have been more fascinating than this movie. It definitely has its own genre: Useless. I mean, even my writing this comment is a useless waste of time.