MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Cookie’s’ Frail Farce Crumbles Under Heavy Plot Line

The funniest observation that “Cookie,” opening today in San Diego County, makes about its New York Mafioso subjects is the mobsters’ routine greeting at home each night. After a hard day’s labor racketeering, drug dealing and money laundering, as the men hit the door, their wives call out brightly, “So, honey, d’ya have a nice day?”

It’s a touch that makes you smile, the sort of perfect detailing with which another director, Elaine May, studs her scripts and her films. Here, director Susan Seidelman keeps her frame busy and lively, and her eye for the right actor in every small role is still precise. But May’s lethal observations always come with a core of humanity, quite missing from “Cookie’s” frail farce.

Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen’s script, for all its individual moments, can’t seem to decide whether it’s the story of Mafia father Dino Capisco (Peter Falk), who learns to appreciate his headstrong daughter Cookie (Emily Lloyd), or whether it’s the story of gum-chewing, chain-smoking 18-year-old Cookie, who outsmarts the mob and the D.A. and becomes a sort of ruling Mafia princess herself.

If it’s a father-daughter story, that humanistic element dissolves with the movie’s conclusion. Actually, whichever story it’s supposed to be, the audience gets short-sheeted. Our sympathies lie with Peter Falk and his dogged inamorata, Lenore (Dianne Wiest), Cookie’s mother. They are supposed to rest with Cookie, who may be smart and has hidden talents as a getaway driver, but Cookie’s a pill and a bore--another in that Seidelman catalogue of heroines like Madonna in “Desperately Seeking Susan” or Susan Berman in “Smithereens,” where brashness is supposed to be charm enough. Enough .

Cookie is understandably teed off when the father she hasn’t seen since she was 5 years old bursts back on the scene and, worse yet, begins giving her orders. Complicated arrangements in the Mafia hierarchy--and his parole--make it impossible for Dino to marry Lenore, but his lust for her is pure and unabated.

The Wiest-Falk scenes, even within the framework of rowdy farce, have a nice adult appreciation to them, and a few lines that make them sing: Lenore flutteringly complains that she’s faded during Dino’s 13 years away. Putting his hand on her face, he says to her--and means it--”You used to have a baby face. Now you’re beautiful.” That’s the way to charm the birds out of the trees. It would be nice if the rest of the movie were as persuasive.

It’s a plot-heavy story of elaborate double-dealing as Dino schemes to get even with his cheating ex-partner, Carmine Tarentino (“Godfather II” icon Michael V. Gazzo), while avoiding a tail that the politically ambitious D.A. Segretto (Bob Gunton) has on him. Segretto is waiting for Dino’s first misstep, which will land him back in the slammer.

Decorating the plot is Dino’s legal wife, Bunny (Brenda Vaccaro), who seems to groom and sell stolen dogs at Bunny’s Bark Place; Vito (Adrian Pasdar, an interesting presence), the young gangster Cookie sets her sights on, and ex-mobster Arnold Rose (Jerry Lewis), now an Atlantic City developer but, like Dino, also cheated by the powerful Tarentino. There is Tarentino’s preening young successor-son Dominick (Joseph Mantello), hilarious with his drawn-out syllables and his poisonous, richly undeserved self-confidence. And lurking with not half enough to do but to show his leonine presence is Lionel Stander as the Capo of Capos, Enzo Della Testa.

The film comes alive with Wiest’s Lenore, the lustiest, most full-blooded characterization in the place--although the idea veers dangerously close to Mia Farrow’s Mafia-madonna in “Broadway Danny Rose.” Smoothing her dress over her hips as she awaits her reunion with Dino, using breath spray, hair spray and room spray until the whole apartment is probably toxic through the year 2000, Wiest rules the movie. Although her method of getting her way with Dino has always been by sofa-moving sobs, there’s tensile steel just under Lenore’s surface. Luckily, with the handsome Falk in the opposite corner, Wiest gets back as good as she gives; the two are a very palpable couple. (The film is rated R for its occasional raunchy language and behavior.)

In the way that Hollywood is notorious for, England’s Emily Lloyd is doing a transplanted equivalent of her first success, as Lynda the hellion-in-training in “Wish You Were Here.” Lloyd seems to have a good ear; she has no real problems with her Brooklyn-Italian speech, nor with her bubble gum. But “Wish You Were Here’s” plucky, emotionally ripped-off 15-year-old single mother had heart, among other notable qualities. Like most of Seidelman’s women, Cookie has brass, and that must serve.

Lynda was desperately vulnerable, which made her all the more appealing. Cookie is ticked-off, noisy, shrewd, self-absorbed, inventive and iron-willed. Vulnerable she’s not. And played against Wiest’s warm-hearted if small-brained expansiveness, it makes Cookie seem even more of a brat, which may not have been the desired effect.

So where does the conclusion of “Cookie” leave its plucky heroine? Eighteen years old. Mudduhless. Fadduhless. Educationless. Ambitionless. With that teeny-tiny chain-smoking habit. And the pluses? She snags the hood of her choice. And she’s sitting on more money than anyone but movie makers (or hoods) probably ever see in the course of one lifetime.

Is this cynical, tinny view of “success” really the best that three lively film makers could conjure up for a character they like? Hard to imagine what they’d wish for someone on their hit list.

‘COOKIE’

A Lorimar Film Entertainment presentation of a Laurence Mark production. Producer Mark. Executive producers Susan Seidelman, Nora Ephron, Alice Arlen. Co-producer Jennifer Ogden. Director Seidelman. Screenplay Ephron, Arlen. Camera Oliver Stapleton. Production design Michael Haller, Costumes Albert Wolsky. Editor Andrew Mondshein. Music Thomas Newman. Sound Tod Maitland. With Peter Falk, Dianne Wiest, Emily Lloyd, Michael V. Gazzo, Brenda Vaccaro, Adrian Pasdar, Lionel Stander, Jerry Lewis, Bob Gunton, Ben Rayson, Ricki Lake.

Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes.

MPAA-rated: R (younger than 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian).