Gosford Park: Movie & DVD Review (2001)

(Originally published 2001)

Robert Altman's "Gosford Park" feels like Agatha Christie by way of Noel Coward, Oscar Wilde and P.D. James. It stars everyone currently working in movies--or at least it seems that way--featuring a large ensemble cast that includes dozens of actors, all of whom have obviously shown up to have a grand good time.

And they do.

The film, from a script by Julian Fellowes, is a leisurely interweaving of the Upstairs, Downstairs classes in an English manor house in 1932. It's at once a murder mystery and a social satire, a movie whose story unfolds with the staccato punch of a blizzard of tiny melodramas, most of which have little to do with the unwieldy plot--but all of which add nicely to the experience of watching the film.

The story, such as it is, is centered around a shooting party held at Gosford Park, the sturdy country estate owned by Sir William McCordle (Michael Gambon), a crude multi-millionaire industrialist, and his younger wife Lady Sylvia (Kristin Scott Thomas), a chilly aristocrat who lives her life with the sort of icy detachment that suggests she'd either freeze if she paused long enough for her blue blood to congeal--or that she is, in fact, already dead.

Arriving for the McCordles' party are a whole host of types, from Maggie Smith's showstopping performance as the acid-tongued Constance, Countess of Trentham; Jeremy Northam as the real-life British matinee idol Ivor Novello; Bob Balaban as an American producer of Charlie Chan movies; and Charles Dance as Lord Stockbridge, a bitter pill who can't bear the fact that Sir William has risen within the aristocracy thanks to his wife's fondness for his newer-than-new money.

Others come and go through the film's busy corridors, but no group resonates more than the servants living downstairs--those who have been charged with orchestrating this hellish party while somehow putting up with the glamorous archetypes "bored to sobs" with its proceedings.

Here, Altman mines small, yet perfectly realized performances from Clive Owen, Helen Mirren, Emily Watson, Ryan Phillippe, Richard E. Grant, Kelly MacDonald, Alan Bates, Dereck Jacobi and Eileen Atkins, all of whom define their characters without ever being showy.

Without its murder--and Maggie Smith’s supremely bitchy and funny asides--“Gosford Park” would have been just a charming museum piece set in the days before Hitler's reign, a quaint slog through the English countryside with characters dusted off from a Merchant Ivory production.

But Altman goes deeper. What interests him is the inner workings of the cast system, which he shakes up and captures through this murder. Indeed, the moment the victim is found slumped over a desk, the film’s several loose ends start to gel as truths are revealed, characters are exposed--and then catharsis, long dormant within these rigid walls, is allowed to unravel within one man's bedroom.

Grade: B+