On Screen
SHARGEL, RAPHAEL
On Screen WOMEN IN TROUBLE By Raphael Shargel Actress Patricia Neal and director Robert Airman, who work together for the first time in Cookies Fortune, are about the same age but belong...
...Particularly fascinating is the contrast between the masculine sensibilities of the merchants and the police—who run the town through logic and common sense —and the more abstract, circuitous, instinctive reasoning of almost all of Holly Springs' women...
...Responsible, too, for the amazing verisimilitude of these two desolate lives is the dreariness of the city that devours them...
...Dutton's Willis is wonderfully humane, a good friend and reliable guardian...
...The screenplay makes it clear that Cookie has grown weary of solitary living, but it is Neal who shows us the peace she has made with death, the eagerness with which she travels from this world to the next...
...In fact, Camille disguises Cookie's suicide so successfully that no one else finds out how she really died...
...When he decides to break things off, he is too cowardly to tell Marie to her face...
...The film's tragic logic argues that in such a humiliating world, fantasies of escape are by no means liberating...
...It is clear from the outset that Chriss sees Marie as merely an object of conquest...
...It concerns two women in their early 20s, Isabelle Tostin (Elodie Bouchez) and Marie Thomas (Natacha Régnier), who find each other while working in one of the city'sugly sweatshops...
...without Neal's resonant performance the rest of the film would not ring true...
...Together, they race joyfully about a shopping mall, make halfhearted efforts to pick up men, and audition for jobs at a club whose waitresses must impersonate Hollywood stars...
...Obsessed with her own self-abasement, she refuses to take solace from Isa, alternately running from her, mocking her preoccupation with Sandrine, and gloating selfishly about the day when she will move in with Chriss and leave her behind...
...It is clear that if Chriss' passion equaled Marie's, or if Sandrine woke up and spoke to Isa, the women would lose interest...
...The two leads jointly won the Best Actress Award at last year's Cannes Film Festival...
...They do learn, however, that she had no money to bequeath after all, and, with the exception of her house, no property...
...Zonca's movie has been both lavishly praised and deeply misunderstood...
...It is also one of his sweetest efforts, and the scenes with Neal are a perfect marriage of diverse sensibilities...
...Isolated, broke and homeless, they strike up a friendship that seems to bring them out of their shells...
...As her fixation grows, Isa begins to write new entries in Sandrine's diary, commencing a relationship far more intimate than anything she has with Marie...
...Willis is arrested for the murder...
...Strangely, critics have reserved the bulk of their praise for Bouchez...
...Her back twisted with age, her mind preoccupied by the loss of Buck, her beloved husband, she nevertheless moves about her large house and neglected garden with almost balletic poise and, when called upon to do so, manifests a sharp wit and a poetic sensibility...
...Awkward rookie cop Jason Brown (Chris O'Donnell) also fancies Emma, who is so loyal to Willis that she insists on being jailed with him...
...Marie, on a tip from her mother, is taking care of the large apartment of a mother and daughter who were badly hurt in a car accident...
...In fact, both women retreat into solitude...
...Only Glenn Close betrays the film, but her failure hurts it a great deal...
...The younger cast members aren't in the league of such seasoned performers...
...Neal first appeared on screen at 23 and is a figure of the golden age: the stunning ingenue of The Fountainhead and The Day the Earth Stood Still...
...She is wonderful, but Régnier has a far more challenging role, and she makes Marie painfully credible...
...Lille is photographed in drab tones, and the work in its textile factories appears endlessly dull and degrading...
...His new movie is set in Holly Springs, Mississippi, a sleepy little hamlet full of dilapidated buildings and oddballs who devote much of their time to catching fish and eating pie...
...When a local stage director produces an adaptation of Salomé with a marquee that reads "By Oscar Wilde and Camille Orcutt," no one bats an eye...
...as The Dreamlife of Angels, but its title might better be translated as The Life Angels Dream Of...
...Altman's concluding and protracted focus on the collapse of Close's schemes ultimately sinks his story into the very conventionalism he earlier avoided so arrestingly...
...As always, Altman pushes his actors to the full extent of their talents...
...The photographic antithesis of the smoothly constructed, brilliantly shot Altman effort, it also deals with a community not often represented on film—working-class residents of the industrial town of Lille...
...Most of the inhabitants are good-natured but shallow...
...Meanwhile, Cora's rebellious scofflaw daughter Emma (Liv Tyler) has returned to town...
...Aside from a brief and mysterious conversation between Marie and her mother, The Dreamlife of Angels reveals little about its characters' pasts, yet it never makes us question the logic of their complex motivations...
...The same can probably be said of every day in the century that has followed...
...The incarceration of Camille and the subsequent happy fishing expedition of our heroes sounds a callous note out of tune with the rest of the story...
...He catches Isa when she is alone at home and asks her to convey his news...
...Marie finds a pleasant, rotund biker boyfriend, then spurns him when seduced by the handsomer, wealthier and far more callous Chriss (Grégoire Colin...
...In death, the old woman continues to exercise her influence over the town...
...All the same, Altman manages to squeeze some charm out of them, even from the usually wooden O'Donnell...
...Like Cookie's Fortune, it is overly long, occasionally obvious, yet very worthwhile...
...Most films that offer no explanation fortheircharacters'unusual behavior leave audiences bewildered and unsatisfied...
...Eyes darting back and forth, her voice agonizingly shrill, she comes across as an embarrassing buffoon...
...Erick Zonca's La Vie Rêvée des Anges has been released in the U.S...
...Behind Lester's back, Emma pours Wild Turkey into Willis' coffee and seduces Jason in the police department storerooms...
...Indeed, Emma, Willis and his defense lawyer Jack Palmer (Donald Moffat) all sit out the criminal investigation of crack sleuth Otis Tucker (Courtney B. Vance) in an open cell, playing Scrabble with sleepy police chief Lester Boyle (Ned Beatty...
...We never learn the reasons for their perversity...
...Altman has concocted a colorful, gently satiric portrait of small-town Southern life, exploring its sensibilities even as he surprisingly deflates almost every expectation the plot raises...
...Tyler's troubled, morally outraged Emma radiates a refreshing conviction that I hope she will bring to future roles...
...Irrationally hoping to secure Cookie's house and fortune, she enlists the aid of her pliable sister Cora (Julianne Moore) and deceives the police into believing that Cookie has been murdered...
...Thus both women reject genuine human interaction, finding their greatest fulfillment in relationships with an imaginary soul mate...
...She falls under the watchful, if soon incarcerated, eye of Willis and the lustful gaze of Manny Hood (Lyle Lovett), a gangly catfish dealer...
...But the film does not devolve into another version of To Kill a Mockingbird...
...Here, for a change, is a murder mystery with no killer...
...instead, they poison the soul...
...She visits the comatose girl in the hospital, sitting speechless for hours next to her unresponsive body...
...As Chriss' interest wanes, her visions of a happy life with him become increasingly vivid...
...Airman, by contrast, worked in television for years before bursting onto the film scene in the late 1960s, long after a severe stroke sent Neal into semi-retirement...
...Altman's depiction of all this has some bite...
...He is black, an alcoholic, and renowned for pilfering liquor from the local blues bar (though he always returns a fresh bottle the next day...
...Moore'ssomnambulant Cora is frighteningly hollow, confusing the lines of Salomé with the words her sister demands she recite to the police, raising her voice only when acting on stage...
...On Screen WOMEN IN TROUBLE By Raphael Shargel Actress Patricia Neal and director Robert Airman, who work together for the first time in Cookies Fortune, are about the same age but belong to very different Hollywoods...
...Deciding about a third of the way in to commit suicide, she dreamily repeats a description of Apollo riding to heaven on a winged golden boat that she has heard from her friend Willis Richland (Charles S. Dutton...
...Initially hostile and resistant, she submits so stiffly to Chriss' aggressive fondling that their love scenes together seem like rape...
...But Marie is fatally smitten...
...She has always carried her personae to extremes, and the pathologically wicked Camille is no exception...
...Still, her absence is felt, and to make up for it Altman has populated Holly Springs with typically fascinating eccentrics...
...As Jewel Mae "Cookie" Orcutt, the matriarch of Holly Springs, Neal registers astonishing depth...
...Unlike the characters in his Nashville and Short Cuts—sweeping visions of large cities that differentiate the lives of people who never meet, or do so briefly and at random—those in Cookie's Fortune know one another well...
...after their initial tryst, he does not take care to conceal his affairs with other women...
...The main plot begins when Cookie's niece Camille (Glenn Close) discovers her aunt's body...
...One merchant's store sports a sign that declares, "On this day in 1897, nothing happened...
...After moving in with Marie, Isa discovers the diary of teenaged Sandrine and reads it...
...But despite the constant and sometimes overbearing diagnosis of their parallel pathologies, critics have mistakenly seen Isa as a lover of life and Marie as racing toward death...
...the passionate, scorned lover of A Face in the Crowd and Hud...
...He is best known for his assaults on conventional Hollywood genres, and for creating radical, sardonic yet realistic narratives about regional America...
...Even worse is the irritating Hollywood tendency to locate the entire impetus for a character's behavior in a single past trauma...
...Willis never had the heart to explain that the bejeweled necklace Buck once bought her is in fact only paste...
...No one who knows Willis, white or black, believes him responsible for Cookie's death...
...Isa is more outgoing than the gloomy Marie...
...Rife with pleasures, Cookie's Fortune does not sustain its magic to the end...
...Devoid of melodrama, Cookie's Fortune succeeds marvelously as a character piece, at least until its final half hour...
...Shot on a low budget and full of technical glitches, it features actors whom only a professional critic or arthouse fanatic will recognize...
Vol. 82 • April 1999 • No. 5
