In
Cookie’s Fortune, director Robert Altman takes
us to Holly Springs, Mississippi (a town halfway between Memphis
and Tupelo) for a mystery caper. Although filmviewers and
two of the actors know who is responsible for a death, the
police do not, but the real mysteries are wrapped up in the
Faulknerian characters, their foibles, and the symbolism of
what we see and wish we could understand from Altman’s clues.
Cookie (played by Patricia Neal) is the one who dies; she
commits suicide. Her nieces Camille and Cora (played by Glenn
Close and Julianne Moore) believe that they are the heirs,
and Camille insists that they hush up the shame of suicide
by faking a break-in, including breaking the glass of a cabinet
where guns are kept. However, the door of the gun cabinet
keeps opening on its own and cannot close. Other clues just
do not make sense to the police, but Cookie’s honest and helpful
black caretaker Willis Richland (played by Charles Dutton)
of the house is arrested because he appears to have blood
on his shirt because he was holding a bag with catfish. The
white chief of police (played by Ned Beatty) does not believe
that the black man is guilty; when asked why, he replies that
they have gone fishing together. But the black man must stay
in jail while the case is investigated, so he is joined by
the chief of police for a game of scrabble and great-niece
Emma (played by Liv Tyler) who offers to be Willis’s cellmate.
Affirmative action has provided black and white police officers
working harmoniously as if Holly Springs had none of the racial
antagonisms experienced elsewhere in Mississippi. Indeed,
a sign "In 1897 nothing happened here" seems to suggest that
the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing segregation, Plessy
versus Ferguson, was never implemented in Holly Springs with
Jim Crow legislation. In the end, the police exonerate Willis.
We discover that Cookie, the nieces, and Willis have common
grandparents; some turned out white, other black, and that
Cookie has willed her estate to a black man whom the white
nieces hope to placate so that they can move into Cookie’s
house. A final mystery is not knowing whether they all ended
up living together. The tagline of the film, "Welcome to Holly
Springs . . . home of murder, mayhem and catfish enchiladas"
is the most delightful spoof of all in a Mississippi that
someday may grow beyond distinctions of race and class. MH
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