There is no denying that Robert Altman has taken directorial chances, and that some of them have paid off. But few if any Altman movies have impelled my second viewing, and quite a few have palled during the first. For me, his most memorable contribution to filmmaking is the soundtrack on which several people talk simultaneously, and much of the dialogue gets lost.
Altman's latest is Cookie's Fortune, with the cutesy inversion of the title remaining typically unresonant. A rich old widow, Jewel Mae "Cookie" Orcutt, yearns for her late gambler husband, Buck, and lovingly fingers his handguns displayed in a cabinet whose glass door keeps mysteriously flying open. Her house, in the southern town of Holly Springs, is shared by a middle-aged black man, Willis, a friend as much as a caretaker, whose chief cares, besides Cookie, are catfish enchiladas, Wild Turkey bourbon, and hanging out in Theo's bar. He also regularly swipes bottles of bourbon from the local store, and returns them, supposedly unnoticed, ever so slightly used.
Cookie's two estranged nieces, living in straitened circumstances, are the artsy, ambitious, and domineering Camille and her obedient, somewhat retarded, younger sister, Cora. Cora also has a daughter, the sexy Emma, who hates her; she is a free spirit just back from an abortive affair in Biloxi and works for Manny, the owner of the catfish store. This clumsy fellow is hopelessly in love with her, even as she conducts a haphazard but passionate affair with young Jason, the hunky and clunky deputy sheriff.
Things really get going when Camille stumbles on Cookie, an obvious suicide, and makes it look, with the coerced collusion of the dim-witted Cora, like murder. The benighted police lieutenant, egged on by Camille, arrests Willis. It turns out that jail life in Holly Springs is no less unconventional than anything else. Emma, who adores Willis, using her 234 unpaid parking tickets as an excuse, moves into the cell with him, the door remaining mostly open, as police and inmates play Scrabble and such. Even that the nieces, ignoring the police tape, have moved into Cookie's house causes only a middling stir.
Almost as much attention is being paid to the annual Easter Pageant, this year offering "Salome, by Oscar Wilde and Camille Dixon," who directs and perhaps also made the posters. The locals are having a fine old time acting, though one is worse than the other. Palmer, the town's only lawyer and Willis's defender, is Herod; the jolly liquor-store owner in an outrageous wig is the Baptist; poor, befuddled Cora, Salome. Hard to tell whether it is for being actors, police, or just ordinary citizens that the good folk of Holly Springs are least suited, as the two criminologists sent from the nearby town duly discover.
All depends on how much tolerance you have for a story in which just about everyone is incompetent, stupid, or crazy. This is a comedy of condescension, my least favorite kind. Even in farce, which this is, some characters should amuse by wit rather than witlessness. The camera seems similarly mindless, paying equal attention to the gutting of catfish and the gutting of Wilde's tragedy.
Charles S. Dutton, as Willis, and several other reliables (Patricia Neal, Donald Moffat, Courtney B. Vance, and Ned Beatty, in particular) struggle gallantly; Julianne Moore is rather too much as Cora, made to look unduly unprepossessing; as the young lovers, Liv Tyler and Chris O'Donnell do what little is required acceptably. But even allowing for the excessive nature of Camille, Glenn Close's performance falls somewhere between gross and gruesome.
In this first screenplay by Anne Rapp, sensational revelations, believable or not, tread on one another's heels; but the one question I kept asking -- Why does that cabinet door keep flying open?-remains unanswered.
It is rare for an American film about personal relations to be as sophisticated as A Walk on the Moon. Like Cookie's Fortune, it was written by a first-time woman scenarist, Pamela Gray, but there the similarity ends. The time is 1969, the revolutionary year, in one of those Catskill bungalow camps where lower-middle-class New York Jewish families summered. Husbands, however, worked in the city and drove up only for weekends. The Kantrowitzes are such a family, with Marty working in a TV-repair store, while his wife, Pearl, is left with their teenage daughter Alison, little and brattish son Daniel, and fussy mother-in-law Lilian (Bubbie) to get on her nerves.
The camp routine is punctuated by loudspeaker-heralded visits from the Ice Cream Man, the Knish Man, and the Blouse Man, the latter a handsome hippie, Walker Jerome. He sells women's clothing from a converted bus and manages to charm even the ungainliest customers. When the extremely pretty and frustrated Pearl drifts into his purview, he bestows a tie-dyed shirt on her without any obvious hidden agenda. Such beguiling unaggressiveness and liberated clothing set Pearl, step by innocent step, on a new sexual course.
That Alison is beginning to date and acts rebellious, that Marty despite his wife's encouragement cannot be more inventive sexually than to grab two toy guns and pretend he is John Wayne, that Walker is charming and not the least importunate -- all this and more contributes to Pearl's drifting into a heady affair. When the world watches the first moonwalk on TV, Marty does so alone in the city, while Pearl is blissfully in Walker's arms. But things come to a head when Alison, playing hooky at the Woodstock festival with her platonic boyfriend, espies her semi-nude and body-painted mother being lofted ecstatically by her lover. Adding to the ensuing crisis is Lilian's getting on Pearl's case and dragging in Marty for all hell to break loose.
The story is told with a fine sense of the little ironies and incongruities of life, as when Marty, amid his agony, remonstrates that Walker Jerome has a name that's the wrong way round; or when Walker, trying to persuade Pearl to run off with him, must instead attend to curing Daniel from a wasp sting and so earn Marty's gruff thanks. It's all terribly, funnily, infuriatingly real, down to every piece of music on the soundtrack and the outrage of the Jewish vacationers when some hippies come skinny-dipping in their lake.
It is a historical turning point as conventions begin to crumble, and also a fresh departure for Tony Goldwyn, a so-so actor who does handsomely as a neophyte director. The British cinematographer Anthony Richmond has shot with a nice sense of atmosphere, even though the Catskills are played by some Quebec mountains. Especially, heartbreakingly good as Pearl is Diane Lane, a former adorable child star who, as an adult, has hitherto received shabby treatment by Hollywood, which owes this refined, lovely, and talented actress considerable reparations.
But the others are no slouches either. Viggo Mortensen aptly balances Walker's genuine warmth and cool lifestyle; Liev Schreiber's Marty is deeply moving both in his clumsy loving and his helpless rage; Anna Paquin is properly headstrong yet vulnerable as Alison, and lesser roles are also well taken. Only Tovah Feldshuh as Lilian gives her customary overripe performance. A Walk on the Moon is as refreshing as a stroll in spring woods, and its love scenes -- even those for its teenagers -- are the most convincing I have seen in many a moon.
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