The Michigan Daily - Monday, September 18, 1989 - Page 15
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Oh; the difficult lives of whites in the South. Maggie (Ally Sheedy), Tuck (Kyle Secor), and Hoyt (Treat Williams)
deal with a crisis over some mixed drinks. Sheedy and Williams were far better actors in their longer-haired
days.
Ridiculous Dixie has a heart,
but doesn't have much brain
Cookie, er, crumbles
Confused direction meets stale stereotypes
BY DAVID LUBLINER
It's not all Cookie's fault.
Emily Lloyd, who portrays this
young Mafia princess, tries aw-
fully hard to make this film work.
It's a very demanding task, espe-
cially when you're part of the
most recent in a long line of
Mafia movies (most of which
were better). Add to that an overly
complex script and terribly con-
fused direction and what's left is
this new Susan Seidelman film.
Emily Lloyd (Wish You Were
Here) plays Carmela Maria An-
gelina Theresa (Cookie) Voltecki,
the 16-year old daughter of Mafia
kingpin Dino Capisco (Peter
Falk). Dino never married
Cookie's mom Lenore (Dianne
Wiest) and has been in the slam-
mer for the past 13 years. After
Dino is released from jail, Lenore
thinks it's a great opportunity for
them to become one big, happy
family. Dino is more concerned
about hunting down his Mafia
peers than raising a rebellious
teenager.
Dino puts Cookie to work as
his personal chauffeur and (no
surprise here) she proves to be as
cunning and savvy as most of the
professional mobsters. The plot
becomes unnecessarily compli-
cated as Cookie and her dad team
up to take revenge on other
Mafiosos who owe him money.
The story lacks originality and
simply rehashes Italian stereo-
types used countless times before.
Unlike Jonathan Demme's Mar-
ried to the Mob, Cookie lacks
any real insight into Mafia cul-
ture. Seeing Peter Falk up front,
one might feel like this a more
colorful version of old Columbo
reruns. The script, written by
Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen (the
BY STEVE KNOPPER
Someday, some filmmaker ought to design a mov-
ing portrait of the turbulent years before the Civil
Rights Movement.
Heart of Dixie fails. It's drab. It's predictable. And
the ending is pure mush.
It's also frustrating, because the film's basic
premise has potential. Ally Sheedy (The Breakfast
Club, Wargames) plays Maggie Deloach, a confused
sorority member who discovers racial enlightenment
during an Elvis Presley concert.
Maggie, though, is the only one who seems to care
about equal rights. The rest of her friends and sisters
have more simple goals - garnering a pin from some
fraternity man, winning a class queen election, and ap-
proaching the toughest, meanest-looking guys to dance
at parties.
Her unenlightened friends - with the exception of
hunk Associated Press photographer and pretty-face
Hoyt Cunningham (Treat Williams) and "God-damned
independent" and even-prettier-face Aiken Reed (Phoebe
Cates) - have all sorts of problems.
One of her sisters comes home from a date and re-
veals to Maggie that the guy tried to rape her. Though
Maggie offers to report the guy and get him kicked off
campus, her sister stops her. "I thought he was going
to give me his pin," she says.
Later, after southern belle Delia June Curry dances
slow with some young hood at a party, her drunk
boyfriend "Jenks" drags her off and winds up dead in a
car crash. It's okay, though, because the recuperating
Delia later breaks out of her depression to announce
that she will still serve as the sorority's nominee for
Honeysuckle Queen.
Maggie soon tires of this and transforms from a
naive sorority girl whose hair bounces all over her face
to an embattled civil rights defender. At the movie's
start, she loves her boyfriend - Boots - even though
his father owns a plantation and treats Black workers
See HEART, page 18
Emily Lloyd struggles valiantly in herrole as Peter F
Cookie remains another tired Mafia movie..
former now particularly known for
penning When Harry Met Sally),
is convoluted and bogged down
with too many details. The ulti-
mate result is that the audience
loses interest in the plight of the
characters onscreen.
Susan Seidelman (Desperately
Seeking Susan, Making Mr.
Right) is one of the more talented
and creative directors today. Here,
though, she thinks that by dress-
ing Cookie up in clothes recylced
from her past films, she will ef-
fectively recreate the Mafia
lifestyle. Seidelman toses in too
many muscial sequences and tries
to over-dazzle her audience with
excessively colorful sets and
backgrounds.
The flair with which she pre-
sented downtown life in New
York City in Desperately Seek-
ing Susan is lost in the subway
ride over to Brooklyn. And if the
whole thing appears a bit old to
See COOKIE, page 18
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