Cinema: Came The Don

COOKIE Directed by Susan Seidelman; Screenplay by Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen

We gather to praise the forgettable comedy. Some movies can be faulted for nothing but low ambition. They aim not for the Academy Award. They disdain the zillion-dollar gross. Not for them a double-domed debate on the op-ed page. But some sweltering August evening, they afford easy wit, engaging performances and, for moviegoers, the satisfaction of 90 minutes well wasted.

Such a one is the film under consideration -- a Mafia comedy. Already the mind contracts with diminished expectations! Non-Italian actors gesturing rambunctiously, speaking with cotton candy in their mouths, plotting elaborate revenge with dim-bulbed resources. Cast Peter Falk as Dino Capisco, a dapper ) don just sprung from Sing Sing. Give him a score to settle with his weaselly partner Carmine Tarantino (Michael V. Gazzo) and a slick, Rudolph Giuliani- style D.A. (Bob Gunton) with an eye to nailing Dino's hide on the front page. Saddle him with a dog-stealing wife (Brenda Vaccaro) and a devoted but ditsy mistress (Dianne Wiest). And do make sure his life finally depends on the skeptical love and untested intelligence of his daughter Carmela Maria Angelina Theresa Voltecki, a.k.a. Cookie (Emily Lloyd).

Lloyd, the English teenager who won prizes for her role in Wish You Were Here, imports a fetching presence and an acute mimicry to her Brooklyn punkster. The rest of the cast has fun playing in a farce summer-stocked with plot twists and cunning character studies. A perfect forgettable comedy -- now what was its name? Ah, yes. Tasty, brittle, sweet, of no nutritional value . . . Cookie. R.C.