"American cinema is a bit like telling bedtime stories to children." - Peter Greenaway
Robert Altman typically begins his films by quickly sketching some self-contained environment (military barracks, hospital, dance studio, radio show, rodeo, stately mansion etc). His environment created, Altman then inserts an ensemble cast and lets his actors improvise or create their own roles.
His actors in motion, Altman then uses a free floating camera to track various characters and tease out various subplots. Of course all directors do this, but Altman's plots seem particularly ill-defined. There is a sense of an entire world in motion, a world which continues along regardless of where Altman pokes his camera. We, meanwhile, are invited to choose where we look and what we see. And so we float from one seemingly arbitrary nodule to the next, sculpting the film ourselves and stumbling upon bits and pieces of a "story" which we are asked to piece together and make coherent.
Altman also typically inserts some symbolic performance-within-the-film. His character's often gather to put on a play, production or show, a kind of self-reflexive model of the film they're in. The play within "Cookie's Fortune" is a performance of Oscar Wilde's "Salome", a tale of seduction, necrophilia, unlawful marriages and dangerous female seductiveness. Why "Salome" was chosen will become apparent to us later on.
Jazz music often find its way into Altman's films. His aesthetic style is itself jazz-like, his films structureless, improvisational and constructed around riffs and ripostes. "Cookie's Fortune" itself takes place in a Mississippi town with a strong jazz and blues tradition. Altman populates this town with lovable Southern eccentrics, amongst whom are Cookie (an elderly woman who commits suicide), a local sheriff and his deputies (who do nothing but drive about and talk about fishing), and Camille Dixon, a bossy matriarch who tends to her slow witted sister, Cora Duvall. Other characters include Manny (a lonely fisherman), Emma (a rebellious young woman) and Willis (a kind black man and local drunk).
Altman has always been a fairly relaxed film-maker, but "Cookie's Fortune" takes things to new highs (or leisurely lows). The film begins with a easygoing walk, and the film as a whole feelings like one gentle cinematic stroll, Altman casually introducing us to his cast and the film's key locations. Elsewhere the film engages in Altman's love for subversion. Watch how scenes or images traditionally associated with danger are subverted or rendered benign. A black man breaks into a house, for example, but it is then revealed that he knows the owner. A man opens a gun cabinet, but he simply wants to clean the guns. A creepy peeping tom spies on a girl, but he means no harm. And so on and so on. Indeed, the film itself is a satire on the Southern Gothic genre and various Tennesee Williams plays, but Altman's tone is less caustic than usual. He seems to love this community of eccentrics.
But there are sinister things lurking about. Watch how Camille Dixon, the director of the play within the film, becomes the God who controls the film's plot and who manipulates the on-screen murder investigation. Surrounded by a sea of inept actors and second rate actresses, she is in control of "Cookie's Fortune" the film, Salome the play, and Cookie's fortune, the literal will and testament of Cookie, a now-deceased elderly woman within the film. As her community bands together outside the Oscar Wilde play, however, Camille begins to lose control whilst they, ironically, begin to gain control of both Altman's film and Wilde's play. This power struggle is epitomised by a character played by actress Julianne Moore, who develops from an incompetent actress to the new star of Salome. She then usurps Camille.
Typical of Altman, there's some dark inter-racial, psycho-sexual stuff hidden in the film's margins. In the Salome myth, Salome is the stepdaughter of Herod and dances seductively before Herod and her mother Herodias. Her mother had her with another man, an affair which causes John the Baptist to denounce the mother's marriage to Herod as being unlawful. For spreading what she perceives to be these lies, Salome executes John. In the film, it is implied that Emma's mother isn't her mother and it is her real mother's sister's husband who is her father. With Camille Dixon obsessed with "pride" and "preserving the pride of the family and community", it seems that perhaps she was covering up some affair (or even a murder) with a black guy who "went back to Africa to serve as a missionary" (or jail or on the run). Altman inserts various breadcrumbs for those inclined to search.
Elsewhere the film advocates a kind of humble, mixed-race community spirit. A kind of sexual liberation where black and white, upper and lower classes, put things aside and get along. The aristocratic and stuck up Camille Dixon (a haemophiliac – on a symbolic level, her blood refuses to mix with outsiders) belongs to an era which the rebellious Cookie and Emma turned their backs on, one skipping town and getting into trouble, the other literally wearing her humble Mississippi State university sweater to her grave. This kind of warmth was typical of Altman's later films, particularly "Prairie Home Companion".
8.5/10 – See Mamet's "State and Main". Worth one viewing.
Robert Altman typically begins his films by quickly sketching some self-contained environment (military barracks, hospital, dance studio, radio show, rodeo, stately mansion etc). His environment created, Altman then inserts an ensemble cast and lets his actors improvise or create their own roles.
His actors in motion, Altman then uses a free floating camera to track various characters and tease out various subplots. Of course all directors do this, but Altman's plots seem particularly ill-defined. There is a sense of an entire world in motion, a world which continues along regardless of where Altman pokes his camera. We, meanwhile, are invited to choose where we look and what we see. And so we float from one seemingly arbitrary nodule to the next, sculpting the film ourselves and stumbling upon bits and pieces of a "story" which we are asked to piece together and make coherent.
Altman also typically inserts some symbolic performance-within-the-film. His character's often gather to put on a play, production or show, a kind of self-reflexive model of the film they're in. The play within "Cookie's Fortune" is a performance of Oscar Wilde's "Salome", a tale of seduction, necrophilia, unlawful marriages and dangerous female seductiveness. Why "Salome" was chosen will become apparent to us later on.
Jazz music often find its way into Altman's films. His aesthetic style is itself jazz-like, his films structureless, improvisational and constructed around riffs and ripostes. "Cookie's Fortune" itself takes place in a Mississippi town with a strong jazz and blues tradition. Altman populates this town with lovable Southern eccentrics, amongst whom are Cookie (an elderly woman who commits suicide), a local sheriff and his deputies (who do nothing but drive about and talk about fishing), and Camille Dixon, a bossy matriarch who tends to her slow witted sister, Cora Duvall. Other characters include Manny (a lonely fisherman), Emma (a rebellious young woman) and Willis (a kind black man and local drunk).
Altman has always been a fairly relaxed film-maker, but "Cookie's Fortune" takes things to new highs (or leisurely lows). The film begins with a easygoing walk, and the film as a whole feelings like one gentle cinematic stroll, Altman casually introducing us to his cast and the film's key locations. Elsewhere the film engages in Altman's love for subversion. Watch how scenes or images traditionally associated with danger are subverted or rendered benign. A black man breaks into a house, for example, but it is then revealed that he knows the owner. A man opens a gun cabinet, but he simply wants to clean the guns. A creepy peeping tom spies on a girl, but he means no harm. And so on and so on. Indeed, the film itself is a satire on the Southern Gothic genre and various Tennesee Williams plays, but Altman's tone is less caustic than usual. He seems to love this community of eccentrics.
But there are sinister things lurking about. Watch how Camille Dixon, the director of the play within the film, becomes the God who controls the film's plot and who manipulates the on-screen murder investigation. Surrounded by a sea of inept actors and second rate actresses, she is in control of "Cookie's Fortune" the film, Salome the play, and Cookie's fortune, the literal will and testament of Cookie, a now-deceased elderly woman within the film. As her community bands together outside the Oscar Wilde play, however, Camille begins to lose control whilst they, ironically, begin to gain control of both Altman's film and Wilde's play. This power struggle is epitomised by a character played by actress Julianne Moore, who develops from an incompetent actress to the new star of Salome. She then usurps Camille.
Typical of Altman, there's some dark inter-racial, psycho-sexual stuff hidden in the film's margins. In the Salome myth, Salome is the stepdaughter of Herod and dances seductively before Herod and her mother Herodias. Her mother had her with another man, an affair which causes John the Baptist to denounce the mother's marriage to Herod as being unlawful. For spreading what she perceives to be these lies, Salome executes John. In the film, it is implied that Emma's mother isn't her mother and it is her real mother's sister's husband who is her father. With Camille Dixon obsessed with "pride" and "preserving the pride of the family and community", it seems that perhaps she was covering up some affair (or even a murder) with a black guy who "went back to Africa to serve as a missionary" (or jail or on the run). Altman inserts various breadcrumbs for those inclined to search.
Elsewhere the film advocates a kind of humble, mixed-race community spirit. A kind of sexual liberation where black and white, upper and lower classes, put things aside and get along. The aristocratic and stuck up Camille Dixon (a haemophiliac – on a symbolic level, her blood refuses to mix with outsiders) belongs to an era which the rebellious Cookie and Emma turned their backs on, one skipping town and getting into trouble, the other literally wearing her humble Mississippi State university sweater to her grave. This kind of warmth was typical of Altman's later films, particularly "Prairie Home Companion".
8.5/10 – See Mamet's "State and Main". Worth one viewing.