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Cookie's Fortune****

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.