
          Mississippi, Chillin'
          Reviewed by Tullos, AllenAllen Tullos
          Vol. 21, No. 2, 1999, pp. 27-28
          
          Cookie's Fortune. Directed by Robert
Altman. Screenplay by Anne Rapp. Director of Photography Toyomichi
Kurita. Music by David Stewart. October Films.
          
"Pride and Pretense are the jockeys of misfortune" warns the
message-board outside the First Presbyterian Church of Holly Springs,
Mississippi. Given the location of Cookie's Fortune
and its opening scenes, moviegoers are justified in wondering what
has become of another familiar, page, rider--Prejudice. Put out to
pasture with his stalking horse Doo-dah, if we are to take seriously
filmmaker Robert Altman and screenwriter Anne Rapp.
          Appropriate to the 1990s' mood of localism in politics and
quiescence and retreat on the civil rights front, Altman's newest
project locates an idyllic Southern small town where racial history
seems but a quaint complexity in a genealogy connecting everyone as
family. "Which means I'm part black?" exclaims the hopeful, anti-belle
Emma Duvall to her old friend, but newly discovered African-American
cousin, Willis Richland. Well, maybe we won't go that far just
yet.
          In its promising opening scene, Cookie's Fortune
plays upon our popular culture archive of situations charged with
racial expectation and the eagerness with which we reach for the
suspect profile. The film begins late on the night of Good Friday,
the Holly Springs streets deserted except for a quietly patrolling
sheriff's cruiser. A black man, whom we have just seen steal a pint
of Wild Turkey, knocks at the rear window of a van while inside, a
young, white woman undresses. She quickly turns out the light and
doesn't answer.
          We follow the stocky man as he breaks into a house, startling a
elderly, white, female resident. It turns out that Willis Richmond
(played by Charles S. Dutton) and Jewell Mae "Cookie" Orcutt
(Patricia Neal) are the best of friends and he's come late, but
dependably, to clean the family pistols. Quickly, our suspicion turns
to trust. As witnesses in the dark, we have sorted the seeming from
the genuine about this intruder and connected with Cookie's
Fortune's central theme. The relationship between the
good-humored, quick-witted Willis and pipe-smoking Cookie, in her
maroon Mississippi State Bulldog jersey and matching sneakers, is
moving and almost plausible, the best part of the film. It is gone
however, in a matter of minutes.
          Cookie's suicide is the most salient surprise and break-through,
sympathetically and effectively evoked. A physically infirm and
mentally-slipping woman, lonelier each year after the passing of her
lifemate Buck, childless Cookie opts for death's golden boat and
golden wings while she still has the wits, will, and courage to
choose. She pulls the trigger on one of Buck's old peacemakers and the
feathers fly.
          The film follows the consequences of Cookie's choice, as her
estranged, niece Camille Dixon, a fading Southern flower, attempts
for reasons of family vanity and propriety, to cover-up the
suicide. Rather than face this embarrassment, Camille, with her
dominated sister Cora in tow, allow Willis to stand falsely accused
of murder. An atavistic character for the era that haunted the
childhood of Tennessee Williams, Camile has not reckoned on just how
much things have changed in Mississippi--this new Mississippi, home
to such popularly elected humanitarians and civil rights boosters as
U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and Governor Kirk Fordice.
          Sure of their fishing-buddy Willis' innocence, but needing someone
to charge and hold while the mess is sorted out, sheriffs' officers
take him into custody. Willis seems a little put out, but no
sweat. Not to worry. In millennial Mississippi, African-American men
suspected of killing white women can expect a standard-issue Atticus
Finch, an unlocked jail cell complete with gorgeous and devoted white
female roommate, a clean wool blanket to pull up on a chilly night
after the Scrabble-playing visitors have left, a feast cooked by an
officer's wife, and a bluesy-but-upbeat soundtrack suggesting
everything's going to turn out just fine.
          Meanwhile, the out-of-town forensics expert bumbles along and the
out-of-town, black-and-suave investigator is befuddled. The message?
Go back into the Heat of the Night, clueless,
suspicious, Mister Tibbs. Between white and black communities,
between juke joint and church sanctuary, we can handle this
ourselves.
          Holly Springs' legacy, as told through passing shots of historical
markers, is that of a town once-swarming with cotton, yellow fever,
and Confederate generals. To move Cookie out form under the long
shadows of complicity in the rewards of a place so long dependent
upon the exploitations of black labor and the domination of black
people, the film invokes the story of her husband, the gambler Buck
Orcutt. Gambling is narrative's and perhaps life's, way of pretending
to give the slip to history. In the turn of cards or the roll of
dice, the winnings seem to wash their hands of any nasty labor that
might have produced them. Buck rode into town in 1929, year of the
Great Crash, with two pistols to his name. Soon he had amassed his
bride Cookie, an antebellum mansion, the little house out back that
Willis Richland would come to call home, and a collection of fake
jewelry appropriate to "the biggest suck that ever lived," in the
film's constant talk of fishing and luck.
          But before Willis can be freed in a Holly(wood) Springs ending to
claim the big house willed to him by Cookie as her nearest kin, there
are a few distractions. There is considerable bumbling around by
Jason (a rookie officer descended from Barney Fife), some hokey in
the poky between Jason and Emma (Barney never got this lucky), and
the First Presbyterian Church's Easter production of Oscar Wilde's
scandalous play Salomé (as abbreviated and directed by
Camille Dixon) with its themes of adultery, murder, wanton sexuality,
suicide, and necrophilic vampirism echoing and anticipating the
course of the filmic story.
          Cookie's Fortune is not slight, as several
reviewers have suggested (by this I think they mean in need of
multiple rocket launchers firing from all directions upon cars
crashing through flaming windows thirty stories up), but, rather,
low-key in giving the appearance of being thoughtful. Frequently deft
in everyday, evocatively-lit detail and alert to the humorous
possibilities of the moment, the film is deaf to its own
unreality. It would have us believe Holly Springs is kept from
utopian harmony only by that haunted scapeghost of Victorian
ladyhood, in all her manipulative trappings, indulged
eccentricities, and unacknowledged offspring. Cookie's Fortune acts
as if the struggle for racial justice has no bitter legacy,
contemporary consequences, nor work left to do.
          
            Allen Tullos editor of Southern Changes and is a
professor of American Studies in the Graduate Institute of the
Liberal Arts at Emory University.
          
        