★★★½

I don’t believe in the end of history.

Count me proudly among those many – left, right, and center – who mocked ol’ Francis Fukuyama for his book, and still adheres to the imperfect, yet far more perceptive word of Fukuyama’s old teacher Samuel Huntington and his response essay The Clash of Civilizations?  Back in college, I had multiple courses structured around beginning with Huntington’s essay and then reading junk paper after junk paper trying in vain to convince me that Huntington was wrong.

None made me doubt myself, until Robert Altman’s Cookie’s Fortune and the unique feeling I got while watching it.  I do not view the world the way Altman does, but I am in awe of his convictions and 25 years later the film is more valuable to us than he could ever have realized.

Charles Dutton appears not reformed, but quietly angelic.  If Glenn Close doth protest too much, Dutton’s relaxed, demure character keeps Altman’s tone consistent.  He knows everything, and yet barely says a word for himself – trusting in truth and communal grace to reveal what it will reveal.  Quite a turn for an actor who spent his first several years of adulthood in prison.  You’d never know it if you’ve never seen him before.

Altman’s sunny end-of-history illustration provokes by defying every boring dramatic and political convention there is.  The film begins with a black man breaking into a house in rural Mississippi.  Turns out, he lives there with an old white lady.  At some point the “save-the-cat” plot has to start.  It turns out to be an absurdly theatrical cover-up act.  The black man looks to be implicated for a violent crime.  There’s just one problem – absolutely nobody believes that he did it.  The police are so sure of his innocence that even when they must detain him at the station, they leave the jail cell wide open.

Lesser films try to insist upon the importance of the plot, its turns, revelations, and in keeping you in suspense to the end.  Altman indulges in no such fantasies.  The hook – the point of the film’s focus – lies in how characters will come through for those they know and love.  The town has a church where people gather to see fantastical performances of Biblical plays.  This is all the escapism they need, and Julianne Moore’s character revelation between her Seven Veils Dance and the ending is a high point in her acting career.  “Not today, Satan,” is always funny, but it has never held as much meaning as it does here.

A two-hour film with no plot and depicting a post-racism picture of harmony would be a strange choice in any era.  In 1999, it is a bold choice.  In 2024, it would be outright heretical.  But the spirit of this film comes from John Ford’s The Sun Shines Bright and his Judge Priest before that.  Altman has not only preserved but updated and reinforced his shared beliefs in American small-town justice and community.  We do not know what to do with it today because the America of 2024 is a more racist country than the America of 1999.  Not because of people who live the way the characters in Holly Springs, Mississippi, but because of those who insist that such people are all backward, deplorable hicks full of rage and bigotry, clinging bitterly to their guns and religion.

Altman was never that person.  It is ironic then that his belief in America, as evidenced by Cookie’s Fortune, is, if anything, proven wrong by how radical that very film is to someone watching it today.  To watch his mini-masterpiece 25 years later evokes a lament for both a time and era that never was, and reminds of what was and is.  If you’re with me on Fukuyama’s nonsense and Huntington’s brilliance, great.  But if you let those dark thoughts keep you from visiting those parts of the country that the media insists have nothing of value, you’re missing something beautiful.

Or, to put that in the terms of Cookie’s Fortune, go fish with some people.  You might just reach the end of history.

– Vivek