I figure this is as good a place as any to mention there will be no Zorro post tomorrow. I've ended up staying at my dad's longer than initially planned, and I didn't watch far enough ahead beforehand. Sorry.
I wonder what attracts my dad to movies like Cookie's Fortune sometimes. It's not a bad movie - it's one of those films set in a small town where every character is a little strange in some way, I don't know what you'd call that, a farce? - it just isn't quite what I'd expect him to be into. Trigger warning for suicide, I guess.
Patricia Neal plays an elderly woman (the Cookie in question), living in her big family house, alone save for her caretaker Willis (Charles S. Dutton). She's estranged from her two sisters Camille and Cora (Glen Close and Julianne Moore), but she likes her niece Emma (Liv Tyler, though I spent most of the movie thinking it was Anne Hathaway, because I associate the short haircut Tyler had with Hathaway now, I guess). While Willis is out running errands to get ready for Easter, Cookie, missing her husband and possibly suffering from senile dementia*, chooses to take her own life. Camille comes by to borrow a salad bowl, finds her, and fearing this will reflect poorly on her, tries to make it look like a burglary gone wrong.
I expected the movie to get grim at that stage, as Willis gets brought in, since it's his fingerprints that are all over the place, and there aren't any other prints. I figured we were in for a depressing trial, Willis being scared and unable to clear his name. Yes, the fact he was a black man suspected of killing an elderly white lady in what appeared to be a Southern town had something to do with my expectations. As it turns out, most of the cops are confident he's innocent, and the whole thing is sorted by the next day, sort of. It's all kind of a joke. The D.A. is running around trying to check Willis' alibi, which isn't going well. Liv Tyler and Chris O'Donnell (playing a meathead deputy) can't keep their hands off each other. Willis has to stay in his cell, but the door is open, and other people visit and bring him gifts at will. Camille blithely ignores the fact Cookie's house is a crime scene, tears down the police tape, and moves in within hours. There's a whole subplot about Camille directing a local production of Oscar Wilde's version of Salome, which is probably a metaphor for certain aspects of the film, but hell if it meant anything to me.
Camille's ability to ignore reality is fairly impressive. At one point, she asks God to forgive Willis if he did commit this act, even though a) the only other person around is in on it with her, b) they both know there was no murder, and c) she's praying to an allegedly omnipotent being. God is going to know Willis didn't kill anyone, lady. She reminds me of a relative of mine, and I don't mean that as a compliment.
My dad and I debated Moore's character afterward. I had asked early on if Cora had some kind of brain damage, but I think we're meant to read it as an act. My problem is, she would have to maintain the facade of being largely vacant and someone Camille can lead by the nose for years. No one in the film sees her behavior as odd. Not Camille, not the cops, not the other townspeople. One of the things that made Emma distant from Cora and Camille is that her mother has always seemed a puppet of Camille's, which means this has been going on at least 15-20 years. I just don't see her keeping an act up that long, waiting for the chance to hoist Camille on her own petard.
* We see one exchange between her and Willis, where they seem to be having two different conversations, like she isn't hearing anything he's saying, and he can't understand what she's talking about, shortly before she dies, but I'm not sure how much that plays into the act. She writes a letter that seems fairly clear in outlining her reasons.
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