Cookie

Screenwriters Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen followed up their brilliant, Oscar-nominated drama Silkwood (1983) with this lighthearted mafia comedy about the illegitimate daughter of a convicted mobster who starts working as his chauffeur when he gets released from jail. Director Susan Seidelman brings her usual grounded-in-reality approach to comedic material; in this case, the results come up short. Cookie is a movie you wish was more of a heightened screwball comedy, especially coming on the heels of a series of mob satires that also missed the mark in various ways—Amy Heckerling's Johnny Dangerously (1984), which is hilarious and was a box office hit but was somehow branded a failure right out of the gate; Brian De Palma's Wise Guys (1986), which was critically acclaimed but dumped by its distributor and considered a financial disaster; and Jonathan Demme's Married to the Mob (1988), which was a hit with both critics and audiences but I think it's actually the weakest entry in this quartet of tonally uneven mafia comedies. Ephron would mine similar material with the bland My Blue Heaven the following year—clearly living with author Nicholas Pileggi and dealing with the not-so-hidden-in-witness-protection Henry Hill inspired both scripts.

Cookie has a wonderful cast. Peter Falk plays "Dino" Capisco, the mobster looking to settle old scores while reconnecting with his daughter. Brenda Vaccaro plays Falk's wife, who had to run a dog-sitting business to make ends meet while he was in prison and now can't give it up. Dianne Wiest plays his mistress, the woman he really loves and wants to settle down with, but is the mother to the daughter who resents him. There are also a host of funny supporting players. Yet the laughs just aren't there. Despite the comical banter between Dino and Cookie, the movie often plays like a father-daughter drama because so little feels even remotely heightened. The issue may rest with star Emily Lloyd, the eighteen-year-old British actress who made a huge splash with her debut performance as a bawdy, feisty, outspoken girl coming of age in a postwar England coastal town in the 1987 film Wish You Were Here. One can understand why Seidelman might have wanted to harness the distinctive spirit Lloyd brought to that film, which won the hearts of critics almost entirely due to her performance.

Lloyd manages to come across authentically as an Italian-American and as a frustrated adolescent, but her Cookie just doesn't feel like enough of a distinctive personality to hang a movie on. Perhaps the character just wasn't there on the page, but considering the pedigree of these screenwriters, I kind of doubt it. One can't help but wonder if Marisa Tomei, Mira Sorvino, or another up-and-coming Italian-American New York actress had played this titular role if they would have brought the needed spark of authenticity that Lloyd brought to her character in Wish You Were Here. Possibly, someone a little older who didn't have to focus on an accent and mannerisms that were so far outside of her lived experience could have let their own idiosyncrasies, humor, and attitude come through and create a more memorable character.

The movie is lackluster in other areas, too. The score by Thomas Newman (who was so inventive with his memorable music in Desperately Seeking Susan, Real Genius, The Lost Boys, and others) is so thin it barely registers. The cinematography by British DP Oliver Stapleton (Stephen Frears's My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, Julien Temple's Absolute Beginners and Earth Girls Are Easy) is a bland let-down after the rich visuals of Seidelman's two previous collaborations with the great Edward Lachman. Perhaps part of the lackluster quality is the simple result of the era this film was made. Of course, this story is not set in the by-then-vanished downtown of Smithereens or Desperately Seeking Susan, but New York is a city that we always imagine as having some kind of personality. In 1989, however, The Big Apple was going through its least colorful period. Look at all the studio movies made in NYC in the last few years of the '80s. Unless they are set in the rarified worlds of Wall Street, Greenwich Village, or the Upper West Side—Working Girl, When Harry Met Sally, Big, Crimes and Misdemeanors—or in very specific cultural enclaves—Moonstruck, Crossing Delancey, Do The Right Thing—the city feels utterly generic. The NYC of the 1970s and early '80s was gone by this point, and the city no longer imposed itself organically on films that were shot there. Filmmakers needed to make a real effort to find personality in their locations, and the Cookie team didn't quite get there.