With its well-heeled
English country manor setting and its oh-so-deco vintage
year (1932), one might wonder what in
"Nashville" the director is doing here:
inveterate nose-thumber Robert Altman navigating a maze of
uppity morals and mores straight out of "Masterpiece
Theater" in full literary flower?
Working with one of his
trademark colliding-ensemble casts, whose chattering
characters constantly step on each other’s verbal heels,
Altman has adapted to the upscale environs without missing
a beat, or an opportunity.
On the surface, "Gosford
Park" is one of those familiar weekend-in-the-country
affairs, in which the isolation of a group of distinct
character types allows for the nurturing of a perfect
microcosm — like bacteria in a petri dish. Midway
through, there’s a murder, and an accompanying
comic-relief detective, which shoves it another familiar
direction.
But all this crisscrossing
familiarity doesn’t breed contempt, thanks to Altman’s
entirely distinctive traffic control measures.
The country estate belongs
to Sir William (Michael Gambon) and Lady Sylvia (Kristin
Scott Thomas) McCardle, who are also throwing the shebang,
complete with afternoon shooting party.
Among the upstairs-invited
are real-life British matinee idol Ivor Novello (a bemused
and elegant Jeremy Northam), star of Hitchcock’s 1926
"The Lodger"; Lady Sylvia’s wizened and haughty
aunt, Constance (Maggie Smith in full Maggie Smith
throttle); Lord Stockbridge (Charles Dance), Lady Sylvia’s
even haughtier brother-in-law; American film producer
Morris Weissman (Bob Balaban), researching his impending
production of "Charlie Chan in London"; and
assorted other relatives and friends, almost all of them
undergoing some kind of turning-point crisis.
And because this is also a
tale of servants and those they serve, each guest gets a
matching valet or maid, whose privileged points of view
become those of the audience.
Altman’s readily obvious
rule of thumb in the upstairs sequences is that at least
one of the servants must be present as a witness to
events. When the help regroups downstairs, the information
is disseminated as needed — for them and us.
Down below, tending to
the guests’ every needs (and we do mean every need), are
the servers. Among them: McCordles’ head butler
Jennings (Alan Bates); Mrs. Wilson (Helen Mirren), head
housekeeper; Mrs. Croft ("Upstairs, Downstairs"
alumna Eileen Atkins), the head cook; Probert, Sir
William’s valet (Derek Jacobi); Elsie (Emily Watson), the
head maid; George (Richard E. Grant), the head footman;
Henry Denton (Ryan Phillippe), film producer Weissman’s
Irish valet; Mary (Kelly Macdonald), cranky Constance’s
maid; and Robert Parks (Clive Owen), brooding valet to
Lord Stockbridge.
Armed with a stiletto
script by Julian Fellowes ("Shadowlands") and
employing a supple camera that rarely reposes, Altman goes
to town, taking in the airs and pretensions of his social
elite and filtering them through the lives of those below
and on the sidelines.
Not a single member of the
huge cast — right on down the line to the seemingly
misplaced, all-too-American Phillippe as the insinuating
Irish valet — fails to come through.
For serious cinephiles,
Jean Renoir’s 1939 masterpiece, "The Rules of the
Game" will immediately come to mind, especially
around the time of the pheasant-shooting sequence, which,
a la the fox hunt in "Rules," is staged to
amplify the follies of the class at hand.
For television devotees,
"Upstairs, Downstairs" will be the reference
point, especially as the intrigue surrounding the
relationships between served and servers begins to pan
out.
And for the murder-mystery
buffs lured in by the "whodunit" promise of the
ad campaign, the wry specter of Dame Agatha Christie will
doubtless be hovering in every nook and cranny, especially
after the killing and the arrival of a quirky inspector
(Stephen Fry) to sort it out.
Though some of the
accompanying satire is anything but subtle (is there an
easier target than the upper classes of a long-ago age?),
the sheer liveliness of Altman’s complex orchestrations is
the abiding joy of "Gosford Park."
If the murder, the
motivations and the outcome all edge toward the obvious,
the characters are rich enough to withstand it all — true
intersecting denizens of an authentically chaotic Robert
Altman repertory.
On the downside, but to no
surprise to fans of Altman’s work, the movie is often hard
to follow. His style of filmmaking involves entanglements
of characters and subplots that don’t appear to have much
to do with one another at first blush, and Gosford Park
takes this to the next level. Here, the murder takes place
at the climax of this confusion, leaving you rather
disoriented in the middle of the 2-hour-plus drama.
Fortunately, the tone loosens up when a comedy-dim police
inspector basically gets nowhere in his investigation, but
the pieces start coming together through the other
characters. The good news is that it all seems to come
together in the end in a way that didn’t require grasping
every detail of every scene
Dan Craft and Dan Heller
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