Cookie's Fortune Review
by Jon Popick (mailbot AT sick-boy DOT com)April 17th, 1999
PLANET SICK-BOY: http://www.sick-boy.com
Robert Altman’s (Short Cuts) latest film is a slow-moving, southern-fried tale about an inbred small town and its annoying inhabitants. Set in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Fortune is cleverly acted, but unfortunately its script is on the fast track to the tri-city area of Predictaville, Boringstown and Dullsburg (which is, ironically, just outside of Holly Springs).
Altman is the most celebrated ensemble-cast director of recent memory, but his direction can’t save the blah story by first-time writer Anne Rapp, who previously was a script supervisor for The American President and The Color Purple. Her story centers around a rich eccentric widow named Jewel Mae Orcutt (Patricia Neal, Hud) or "Cookie" to her friends. She has a warm, Driving Miss Daisy-type relationship with Willis Richland (Charles S. Dutton, Get on the Bus), the town drunk and catfish enchilada guru, but on the eve of Easter she decides to blow her brains out in hopes of being reunited with her late husband. This simple premise takes over thirty minutes to set up.
The trouble is that Cookie’s carcass was discovered by her busybody niece Camille Orcutt (Glenn Close, Paradise Road), who, believing she will be the heiress to the Orcutt fortune, decides to make the suicide look like a murder. Since his prints were all over the gun - he had cleaned Cookie’s collection the previous evening –Willis becomes the most likely suspect and is immediately incarcerated.
The rest of the film unfolds like a bed sheet forged in extra static cling. The only thing that livens it up are the kooky characters – especially Julianne Moore (Psycho) as Cora Duvall, Camille’s nitwit sister and the star of the town church’s stage presentation of Oscar Wilde’s “Salome.” Things liven up a bit once Courtney B. Vance (The Preacher’s Wife) shows up to investigate the murder/suicide, but by that point the film has already overstayed its welcome. All the viewer can do is sit back, relax, and wait for the obligatory shot of someone getting caught with their hand in the cookie jar.
2:00 – PG-13 for violence, sexual content and some mild adult language
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