Hazelle Goodman makes bluntness funny and authority convincing. Cookie in Deconstructing Harry gives us the clearest reason to value her comic timing, though her screen work has too often called on her simply to be formidable.
Fi1m perspective
Cookie speaks plainly amid the difficult company of Deconstructing Harry (1997), and Hazelle Goodman makes that plainness funny. Her direct commentary steadies Woody Allen's comedy as it shifts between a writer's life and his fiction. We laughed at Cookie's bluntness because it makes the surrounding self-absorption easier to bear. Goodman's timing keeps the character from becoming merely a solemn voice of reason. The film does not always serve its women well, but she gives us a reason to welcome another argument.
That breakthrough followed a 1995 television special adapted from her one-woman stage show, developed over seven years. The solo work involved multiple characters, a useful corrective to the idea that her chief skill is playing an outspoken woman. Her recurring Georgia Rae Mahoney in Homicide: Life on the Street (1997–98) drew on something harder: authority and menace as a powerful figure in a drug family. Yet the screen career that followed remained largely a matter of supporting and episodic work.
Ridley Scott's Hannibal (2001), in which she plays Evelda Drumgo, is a less useful place to begin. It has considerable polish, and Anthony Hopkins supplies some malicious fun, but the suspense is slack and Julianne Moore is thinly used. Goodman's presence cannot make that an easy recommendation. Nor should a widely seen supporting appearance become the performance by which we measure everything else she does. Deconstructing Harry gives us more of the comic delivery that distinguishes her work.
The reservation is about the parts as much as the films. Casting Goodman as a strong, streetwise woman draws on skills she has, but it can also make forcefulness the only thing a script requires of her. We would like more roles that use her humour without requiring her to deliver blunt corrections to everyone else. Start with Deconstructing Harry, provided Allen's sour company appeals; do not expect its interest in its women to match hers.
Biography
Hazelle Goodman is an actress from Trinidad and Tobago. Born Hazel Goodman on 16 February 1959, she moved to New York as a child and was raised in Queens and Brooklyn. She graduated from the City College of New York with a degree in drama.
Goodman developed a one-woman show titled Hazelle!, which was adapted as an HBO special in 1995 and received two Cable Ace Award nominations. In 1997 she played Cookie in Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry, becoming the first black actress with a prominent role in one of his films. She had a recurring role as Georgia Rae Mahoney in the series Homicide: Life on the Street (1997–1998).
Her other screen credits include Heat (1995), Hannibal (2001), All the Invisible Children (2005) and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011). On stage she has appeared in Cymbeline and The Vagina Monologues.
