Cookie's Fortune is a very dark comedy mistakenly billed as a drama bordering on a whodunit. It's got Julianne Moore, who as always is outstanding (she's the reason I picked the film, although I had heard of it before because it's the one that made Liv Tyler cut off all her hair a while back), Glenn Close, who has a memorable part as a kind of a Cruella DeVille meets Scarlett O'Hara, Liv Tyler, who is in an out-there cute bad girl role which is delightful, Ned Beatty, Chris O'Donnell (another great performance, and I'm not what you'd call the biggest Chris O'Donnell fan in the world), Charles S. Dutton, Lyle Lovett as a sleazy fisherman, the guy who played the pedophiliac beauty pageant judge in Drop Dead Gorgeous, the guy who plays the senile ex-lawyer on The Practice... Excellent ensemble cast, and they really make the movie. See, the whole story revolves around the characters in a small Mississippi town, and it wouldn't work if you didn't feel like you know what it's like to live in the town, but the familiar cast really helps with that. Plot-wise, it's about a woman named Cookie who commits suicide, but as her sister Glenn Close says, "Only crazy people kill themselves." In an effort to salvage her family's reputation, Glenn Close gets her mentally challenged but adorable sister Julianne Moore to help her fake a robbery/murder, and the movie revolves around the investigation of this crime and how all the characters react. But what really makes it work are all the small touches, the little things people do, like having a candle-lit dinner in a jail cell or hogging the bedside electric fan (you'd have to see it to really understand). This may not mean much to most people, but in one scene, Julianne Moore looks out a window and points out a Magnolia tree, and I absolutely freaked out (I became a rabid Julianne Moore fan because of her performance in Magnolia). It was a very cool moment. Anyway, I give the movie an 8. Not exactly ground-breaking and unforgettable, and it's got some really unnecessary but harmless plot twists towards the end, but it's lots of fun throughout.
Review of Cookie's Fortune
