Shaun de Waal Altman movie of the week
Robert Altman is the quintessential American maverick, a director with a filmmaking career long, prolific and tempestuous enough to make John Huston envious. The combination of his freewheeling style and often nihilist -or at least very pessimistic -take on humanity has made for many unforgettable films.
Altman, whose career presaged those of today’s semi-independents by decades, always had an uneasy relationship with Hollywood. It was deeply ironic, then, that his biggest hit in years, which re-endeared him to the moguls, was The Player – a satire about Hollywood that skewered both personal wickedness and artistic cowardice.
Its success enabled him to make Short Cuts, a multi-story epic in the mode of his sprawling 1975 masterpiece Nashville. This after Altman had spent most of the Eighties adapting plays to the screen with considerable low-budget invention (Streamers; Fool for Love; Beyond Therapy …). At times it seemed this was an ironic penance for his earlier, bigger-budget flops, in particular 1980’s disastrous Popeye with Robin Williams.
Following Short Cuts, Altman made Prt– Porter and Kansas City, two more large-cast sprawlers in what is now seen as the patented Altman manner. But the returns were diminishing. Recently he had to descend to the level of the unfortunate Francis Ford Coppola and make a John Grisham adaptation.
But, one way or another, Altman keeps making movies – an associate once said of him that he needs to shoot film like others need to eat. If he can’t make a big movie he’ll make a small one. His latest, Cookie’s Fortune, is not a big one, but it makes his usual excellent use of an ensemble cast. There is even one of those mysterious peripheral figures that haunt the edges of Altman’s movies like unquiet ghosts (in this case, it’s an affecting, practically mute Lyle Lovett).
Another recurrence in many Altman movies is the complex, often equally enigmatic, female character. Apart from his Three Women, which had three, Julie Christie in McCabe and Mrs Miller or Karen Black in Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean spring to mind immediately.
Three generations of Southern women are at the centre of Cookie’s Fortune. The death of Aunt Jewel, also known as Cookie (Patricia Neal), leads to a murder investigation, thanks to her meddling niece Camille. This ruthlessly bossy belle, flamboyantly brought to life by Glenn Close, is directing an Easter play (“Salom, by Oscar Wilde and Camille Dixon”) as if it were a war of conquest. Her pliant sister, Cora (Julianne Moore), is playing the Judean seductress. (She seems not altogether there, qualifying her as one of Altman’s mystery women.) And Cora’s estranged daughter, the independent and forthright Emma (Liv Tyler), is back in town.
Add characters such as Cookie’s black factotum Willis (Charles S Dutton), Ned Beatty as the good-hearted sheriff, and Chris O’Donnell displaying a neat comic talent as a dull-witted young cop, and it all makes for a very satisfactory yarn. This is not ultra-Altman: his usually restless cameras are still, and the movie is less bleak and less urgent than one might expect of him. But Cookie’s Fortune is still hugely enjoyable, with many moments that show the touch of the old maverick.