In this undervalued 1999 comedy Robert Altman once again uses a social microcosm to anatomize contemporary America. The Easter weekend setting in Holly Springs casts a Christian framework around the seedy Mississippi small town setting.
That birth/death issue also drives the three central characters. Camille Dixon (Glenn Close)— blending Garbo and the Mason Line— is the classical Southern Belle pretending to purity. The director of community theatre tries to hide the fact that her Aunt Jewel Mae "Cookie" Orcutt (Patricia Neal) has committed suicide. Camille is so assured of her privilege that she runs roughshod over the police crime-scene tapes and assumes she will inherit her aunt’s estate. She even claims co-credit with Oscar Wilde for her production of Salome. Camille falls from inherited privilege to madness. Selecting that play -- however modified -- for an Easter church presentation reveals the white leader's compromised moral sense and authority. Her personal doom reflects the self-destruction and failure of the racist project.
As a result of Camille’s vain machinations, the suspicion of murder befalls Cookie’s closest friend and help, Willis Richland (Charles Dutton). Willis personifies the complexity and delusions of American white supremacism. We’re led to be suspicious of his every action, only to be disabused by his virtue. His night invasion of the mansion is to keep his promise to clean Cookie’s guns. If he steals a mickey of bourbon at night he replaces it the next day. His knowledge completes Cookie's crossword.
Indeed Willis refutes the myth of America’s racial abyss. His white grandfather sired a huge keyboard of children and grandchildren, a spectrum of whites and blacks. Willis’s surname anticipates Camille’s bequest of her estate to the most legitimate heir, this black man. He was to that manor born.
As Willis refutes the cliche of the shiftless inferior black, Ned Beatty provides an affable humane alternative to the Rod Steiger redneck stereotype sheriff. Beatty’s Lester Boyle immediately knows Willis is innocent by his homespun wisdom. In fishing veritas.
The third central character is the most ambiguous. Emma Duvall (Liv Taylor) is a vagabond with an instinctive bond with Willis and an equally compelling antagonism both to her supposed aunt Camille and to her putative mother Cora (Julianne Moore). That bloodline proves as fallacious as the assumptions of Willis’s essential difference.
Throughout, human instincts run athwart social expectations. Though Emma is an outlaw, of suspect character and security, her compulsive affair with rookie cop Jason (Chris O’Donnell) provides a romantic energy and bracing spirit otherwise lacking after Cookie’s suicide.
Indeed if Camille was counting on getting the fortune cookie she assumed her due, that fortune is as ersatz as Cookie’s fake necklace. The true fortune is the border-crossing relationships that dissolve the vicious faultlines we usually see in Mississippi dramas. On this Easter the humane America is reborn — not least because a child saw and reported the gun hidden among the Easter eggs.
No comments:
Post a Comment