BEFORE: Lyle Lovett carries over from "The New Guy" - he really hasn't been in that many movies, and it seems like a good portion of the films he has acted in were directed by Robert Altman - like "Short Cuts", "The Player" and "Ready to Wear". Today's film was also directed by Altman, which could be good, or could be bad. I've tried to see as many of Altman's film as I could, but while I'm a fan of "Short Cuts" and "The Player", he also had some films that were just OK, like "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" and "Nashville", and also stinkers like "Dr. T & the Women", so you just never know.
THE PLOT: Conflict arises in the small town of Holly Springs when an old woman's death causes a variety of reactions among family and friends.
AFTER: Yeah, I was afraid of this - there's something of a good idea behind "Cookie's Fortune", but parts of it are really dumb, and other parts just drag on and on, over-explaining everything that doesn't need to be explained. Maybe this is an accurate portrayal of life in a small town in Mississippi - I wouldn't know, I've never been there - and maybe if I visited there or lived there I'd get this same feeling, that life moves at a snail's pace, everything takes too damn long and all the residents are clueless as hell about life. Could be true.
One character in particular is intentionally slow, I don't know if she's learning disabled or mentally challenged or whatever the proper PC term is these days, but she somehow manages to remember all her lines for the church's Easter-themed play, so I'm not sure. The storyline on IMDB just calls Cora "incredibly shy", which I suppose is a thing, but then that doesn't seem to match up with Cora playing Salomé, a Biblical character noted for performing "The Dance of the Seven Veils", which is essentially an ancient striptease, right? This could have really livened up the film, since Julianne Moore plays this "incredibly shy" character, but the director chose not to go that way - his loss.
Cora's sister, Camille, on the other hand, is the pushy director of the play, who's taken it upon herself to rewrite some of Oscar Wilde's scenes, so that sort of tells you what you need to know about Camille. She's always sure that she's right, and she takes advantage of her shy (or is it dumb?) sister whenever she can. The two women go over to their Aunt Cookie's house to "borrow back" (aka steal) their mother's fruit bowl, only to find that Aunt Cookie has committed suicide with a gun. But since it wouldn't be "proper" for a member of their family to have committed suicide, plus since only crazy people commit suicide this would imply that there is madness in their family (quite clearly there is, so I don't see what the big deal here is) so Camille stages the suicide to look like a break-in and impromptu murder, removes the gun from Cookie's hands and ditches it in the yard, before calling the police.
Based on the evidence, the police determine that the prime suspect is Willis Richland, Cookie's friend and handyman, who had cleaned all the guns for her the night before, so therefore his fingerprints were on the gun in question. Even though Willis is known by everyone in the town as a sweet man who would never kill another person, he's put in jail anyway (well, sort of) while they straighten everything out. The sheriff is convinced Willis is innocent just because they fish together regularly, that's the kind of town it is.
The ensemble cast is the sort you'd expect to see in an Altman film - nearly everyone's in that church play, including the dead woman's family attorney, and also the rookie cop who can't seem to keep any information about the case to himself. He's sleeping with Emma Duvall (everybody in this film seems to use everyone else's first and last names at every opportunity, and that's just not how most people talk) and Emma just happens to be the daughter of Cora (the shy one), the niece of Camille (the pushy one) and close friends with Willis (the accused one). So yeah, it's a small town, everybody's connected, we get it - still the film keeps over-explaining to us how everybody is related to each other, ad nauseam.
Or maybe it's just the fact that there's not much of a mystery here - since we saw Camille stage the crime scene, we know Willis didn't kill Cookie. So much for suspense. Wouldn't it have worked better if we hadn't seen everything up front, so we the audience would still have some doubt over whether Willis was guilty, also if he didn't kill Cookie, then we could still wonder who did? I guess Robert Altman wasn't much for crime dramas, which employ the usual technique of having a detective figure out the crime scene, and then we all get to see the crime being committed in flashback sequences. I know, I'm usually the one complaining about flashbacks and non-linear narratives, but here's a case where they could have been useful and served a purpose, and they weren't even used at all. What a shame.
Instead we get to meet all of Willis's friends as they're interviewed by the police and a special investigator brought in from a bigger city, as they confirm (THREE TIMES!) that Willis was doing errands on the day of Cookie's death, just like he said he was. It's overkill - and like the fish supplier character (played by Lyle Lovett) who seems to have a thing for Emma and is building an apartment for her out of a train caboose, largely unnecessary. You could take Manny the fishmonger's character right out of the film and it would hardly make any difference. By the same token, there are a few too many police characters for such a small town.
It's also quite obvious that "Salomé", the play within the film, is largely symbolic of the larger crime, especially when the soldier character (played by Jason, that rookie cop) commits suicide, mirroring Cookie's own choice to take her life. Plus the whole thing is set on Easter weekend, so there's a tie-in with Jesus' sacrifice, too - in the deaths of Cookie and Jesus, there's a similar confusion over what really happened, I'll wager.
It's just a very clunky mystery story here, and it didn't need to be. Camille didn't HAVE to re-stage the suicide scene, but she did, so the story then has to deal with the repercussions of that. Every little detail is super-important, like the fact that the neighbor kid saw what happened, and that the lawyer just happened to know exactly where Cookie hid her will. I'll maintain there were much more elegant ways to move this story along, ones that didn't rely on coincidences and last-minute revelations, but the film just didn't seem interested in those methods. Nah, let's just keep making things more and more confusing before starting to resolve anything.
And of course, the fact that Camille could so easily steamroll her sister Cora into believing a different version of the facts is going to come back and haunt her. (Hmm, that feels a little bit familiar. Who's also known for presenting sets of "alternative facts" to the American citizens, without worrying about any of the possible repercussions? Karma's a bitch, man, just saying.).
If I had known this was set over Easter weekend I would have preferred to watch this then, but since I needed the linking this film provided now, maybe it's better that I didn't know. And this way the theme of characters going to jail also carries over from "The New Guy".
Also starring Glenn Close (last seen in "Father Figures"), Julianne Moore (last seen in "Wonderstruck"), Liv Tyler (last seen in "Ad Astra"), Chris O'Donnell (last seen in "The Bachelor"), Ned Beatty (last seen in "Nashville"), Courtney B. Vance (last seen in "Office Christmas Party"), Charles S. Dutton (last seen in "Against the Ropes"), Patricia Neal (last seen in "Ghost Story"), Donald Moffat (last seen in "The Bonfire of the Vanities"), Danny Darst (last seen in "Swing Shift"), Matt Malloy (last seen in "Phil Spector"), Randle Mell, Niecy Nash (last seen in "Selma"), Rufus Thomas (last seen in "Elvis Presley: The Searcher"), Red West (ditto), Ruby Wilson, Preston Strobel, Ann Whitfield, Hank Worsham, Christopher Coulson.
RATING: 4 out of 10 rolls of yellow crime-scene tape.
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