My World of Flops Crumby Case File #195: Cookie (1989)
From the vantage point of 2021 it seems inevitable that Nora Ephron would make the big leap from journalism, books and screenwriting to filmmaking and become of the most beloved writer-directors of her time.
But Ephron came of age as a screenwriter at a time when there weren’t many female directors and, as is generally the case, women had to be infinitely more talented and hard-working than their male peers to score the same opportunities.
The shaggy, affable 1989 mob comedy Cookie seems like a perversely modest, minor project for a future giant of the silver screen like Ephron but when she co-wrote the screenplay with her Silkwood writing partner Alice Arlen there was no guarantee that she’d ever become a filmmaker, let alone a giant of the field.
In another timeline Ephron kept plugging away as the screenwriter of quirky, modest fare like Cookie and never became the queen of glossy, upscale romantic comedies. That would be quite alright with me since I have come to appreciate the funky, non-commercial, less successful side of the filmmaker’s oeuvre, the movies that didn’t catch on with the masses and become beloved modern classics.
I’m talking movies like This is My Life, My Blue Heaven, Mixed Nuts, Lucky Numbers and Cookie, which is so slight that it barely exists but is full of scrappy, low-key charm all the same.
Cookie is a product of the curious, brief era when English actress Emily Lloyd seemed poised for stardom following her breakout role as a precocious teenager in the 1987 drama Wish You Were Here.
When she moved to New York at 17, Lloyd seemed poised for stardom but was doomed to become better known for the roles she turned down or was fired from than the ones she played. Like many other actresses, Lloyd turned down the lead role in Pretty Woman but also was relieved of prominent roles in Mermaids, Husbands and Wives and Tank Girl.
Alas, the movie industry is particularly brutal to actresses who struggle with mental illness. They get labeled as difficult or impossible, as Lloyd was post-Wish You Were Here and roles vanish accordingly.
That’s a shame because in Cookie Lloyd is a compelling combination of toughness and sweetness, grit and vulnerability but what could have been a star-making role instead ended up doing nothing for her as the movie flopped with critics and at the box-office.
Cookie casts Lloyd in the title role of Carmela "Cookie" Voltecki, the daughter of married career criminal Dino Capisco (Peter Falk) and his adoring longtime mistress Lenore Voltecki (Dianne Weist).
Cookie begins with Dino serving out the end of a thirteen year prison sentence. When the veteran mobster is released Lenore, who never stopped loving or believing in Dino even when he gave her every reason not to, is overjoyed.
In the kind of neatly realized detail that sets Cookie apart, when Dino is finally sprung from the big house he and Lenore go at it like a pair of teenagers who have just discovered sex and are keen on making the most of that discovery as possible.
Lenore doesn’t just desire this married ex-convict and career criminal: she lusts for him. Dino, in turn, responds to Lenore’s advances like someone who has been in jail for over a decade and is obscenely grateful for a woman’s touch.
Cookie is of course more than a little grossed out by her parents’ PDAs but that seems attributable more to them being her mom and dad than their looks. Cookie refreshingly lets its middle-aged lovers be nakedly sexual.
They may be adults old enough to have created a teenager but emotionally they’re kids whose psychological growth has been stunted by Dino’s prison sentence.
Dino discovers that the world has changed since he was last a major player in the underworld. Instead of being given money that he’s owed he instead gets the runaround from frenemy Carmine (The Godfather Part II’s Michael V. Gazzo), a rival who takes malicious delight in emasculating his rival.
As the screenwriter of My Blue Heaven and the wife of Nicholas Pileggi, who wrote the book Goodfellas was based upon and co-wrote the film’s screenplay with Scorsese, the world of the mafia was one Ephron was intimately familiar with when she wrote Cookie.
Cookie accordingly eschews the cliches and broad stereotypes of mob comedies and delivers a more nuanced portrait of organized crime less as a glamorous realm of killers and capos than a world of middle-managers struggling for advantage in a literally kill or be killed business.
Cookie and her mobbed-up old man do not get along initially but they begin to bond when she stumbles into a gig as her father’s driver and sidekick.
The mobster’s street-smart daughter proves useful in other ways as well. She reaches out to the FBI to see if her father can be put in Witness Protection before helping cook up a scheme that will eliminate Dino’s biggest enemy and make it possible for him to finally marry Lenore.
Cookie works best as a dual coming of age movie. It’s about an aimless young girl finding out who she wants to be as a woman and a middle-aged man learning what it means to be a free man and a father under less than ideal circumstances.
Cookie is consistently amusing and observant without ever being hilarious and engaging throughout without being riveting. It’s a decidedly small movie distinguished by uniformly excellent performances, most notably from Falk and Lloyd as very different people who discover that they’re not quite so different after all.
It’s a nifty little sleeper, a very human, very New York movie that rewards low expectations but also requires them. I wish that Ephron had made movies like this, little character studies blessed with an assured sense of time and place but I suppose making blockbusters paid better than weird little movies seemingly no one saw or talks about.
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