We can pretty much always expect something good from Robert Altman, and "Cookie's Fortune" doesn't disappoint. Focusing on a suicide in a Mississippi town and how it reveals some secrets about various people, they make the most of everything. Camille Dixon (Glenn Close) is a character of her own: when she sees that her aunt Cookie (Patricia Neal) has taken her own life (the old woman wants to rejoin her late husband),she tries to make it look like a murder, claiming that only crazy people commit suicide; watching the movie, anyone would have to agree that Camille's the craziest person in the movie.

I will assert that this is Charles S. Dutton's best movie yet. As Cookie's caretaker who gets charged with the murder, he shows himself as strong, but not ridiculous. Julianne Moore, Liv Tyler, Chris O'Donnell, Ned Beatty, Courtney B. Vance and Lyle Lovett also have some great lines. The movie mainly goes to show that despite the racism in the South, white people and black people have a lot more exposure to each other than in the rest of the country. Really good.

I must say this ensemble effort doesn't begin too promisingly -- another glimpse of oddity in a small Southern town, people with names like Jewel Mae and Otis and Lester, something along the lines of Beth Henley's "Crimes of the Heart," which couldn't be saved even by my own sterling performance.

And it is a little casual in establishing its characters. One wonders where the hell it intends going. Patricia Neal does a fine job with the role of the decrepit old "Cookie" Orcutt in the opening scenes. Neal is old but not THAT old and the talent behind the performance still glows under the crusted patina. But then so does everyone else's, and it's a good cast.

Basically the plot is thus: Cookie, knowing she'll join her husband in heaven, cheerfully shoots herself in the head. Two younger cousins -- the too-clever Glenn Close and the exceedingly dumb Julianne Moore -- discover the body and decide to make it look like a murder, suicide being too much of a disgrace for the family to bear.

Then the plot gets off the ground in its casual, laid-back, Mississippian way, kinda like a sleepy dog rousin' itself to slink off the dusty road so the universal harvester can chug past. It's too twisted to detail but there were several times I laughed out loud. "Crimes of the Heart" only got one laugh.

The gags come not just from Anne Rapp's screenplay but from Altman's direction as well. A semi-serious criminal interrogation goes on in the foreground while in the background two officers marvel at the dimensions of a stuffed catfish on the wall. Glenn Close manages to be caught with her hand in the cookie jar -- literally.

I won't go on about it. It's a relaxing and amusing fairy tale.

One might call Cookie's Fortune a 'minor' effort from Robert Altman, a filmmaker who once commented that each film "is all part of the same picture", or rather one long movie with bits and pieces making up a career whole. But it has enough going for it through its very competent cast and interesting script to keep it afloat from being the kind of small film little old ladies might watch on TV during the day. In that sense it isn't as 'heavy' as some of Altman's other work. It is also cool enough to treat the subject of a mystery around a suicide with enough humanity to make some scenes smile-worthy. Considering some of the darker elements in the script, Altman depicts this to the point where- get this- Cookie's Fortune is sometimes shown on the HBO family channel!

Is it really a kid's film? I'm not sure, but it isn't work for only one age group- its appeal from its cast of a collective of small towners is appealing to most in the audience. That the cast- Glenn Close, Liv Tyler, (especially) Charles S. Dutton, even Chris O'Donnell- gels and plays some of the dialog sincerely even when its meant to not be taken seriously at all, is a credit to the filmmaker. That it also might not be quite as memorable as some of the director's major films is and is not a fault. It is a fault because the subject matter is sort of stuck in a certain genre realm. It is not because the subject mater is also very much more intelligent than would be expected at times. I was also fond of certain scenes and interactions with the actors, the rhythm of it all, like early on with Dutton and the actress Patricia Neal who plays the old lady. I also really like the climax.

So it's a good work about the rumblings and eccentricities of a small town, the good in people as well as the lesser parts, and parts of greed and death seen through a light that is not aiming for anything 'cheap', so to speak.