Gosford Park (2001)
Directed by Robert Altman

Film Review

In Gosford Park, his first British movie, director Robert Altman assembled a cast of truly stellar proportions and delivered what was to be his second most successful film, after his 1970 hit MASH.  Taking their inspiration from the crime novels of Agatha Christie and Jean Renoir's 1939 film La Règle du jeu, Altman and his screenwriter Julian Fellowes craft a slick but fairly superficial period drama that combines the familiar whodunit with a witty examination of Britain's disintegrating class system of the 1930s.  Gosford Park is not only one of Altman's most entertaining films (a long overdue return to the standard of his most inspired period in the 70s and 80s), it is also one of his most elegantly crafted.

The film excels most in its photography, which makes the absolute most of its attractive real locations to suggest a world of stale artifice, defined by undeserved privilege and social division.  The camera glides from room to room, making us feel like guilty voyeurs on a world from which we feel permanently excluded.  Upstairs, there are the hopelessly effete upper crust snobs, who idle about languorously in ornate armchairs and divans, bickering among themselves and seemingly incapable of doing anything for themselves.  Downstairs, the kitchen staff are working flat out to keep their masters fed in the manner to which they have grown accustomed.  Servants dart back and forth, unseen by the toffs who depend entirely on them for even the simplest of tasks, such as opening a thermos flask or warming up a cup of milk.  The whole ensemble feels like an inordinately complex mechanical toy, a manufactured clockwork world, inhabited not by people but by unthinking automata.

The film hardly puts a foot wrong until the fatal moment when a scream rips through the fabric of this perfectly ordered world and announces the unexpected arrival of the last house guest, Agatha Christie (in spirit if not in person).   From here on, Gosford Park becomes an altogether different kind of film, a rather lame and self-consciously silly murder mystery which seems to have been copied wholesale from one of Dame Agatha's less successful stories.  Stephen Fry's appearance as a bumbling detective lays into Gosford Park like a gigantic bulldozer that has run amok on a London housing estate, and the film struggles to maintain its dignity in the forty or so minutes that remain to it as the murder mystery is painfully and laboriously unravelled.

Despite the abundance of so many first class actors, it is surprising how few of the characters in the film make any real impact.  It is hard to miss Maggie Smith's waspishly sardonic Lady Trentham or Kristin Scott Thomas's sensuous, man-hungry Lady McCordle, but the rest of the cast just merge into an indistinct blur, like barely glimpsed faces on a fast-moving train.  This exposes the central weakness of the film, that it doesn't gives us the time or the space to become acquainted with any of the characters.  The acting may be exemplary, but most of the characters are, by necessity (given their number), no more than thinly sketched stereotypes (mostly shallow imitations of bods gleaned from the novels of Evelyn Waugh and Agatha Christie).  Enjoyable as the film is to watch, it fails to leave much of a lasting impression, and as a critique of the 1930s class system, it has nothing like the sophistication and razor-sharp edge of Renoir's legendary film.

Film Synopsis

England, 1932.  Sir William McCordle, a wealthy industrialist, welcomes an assorted gathering at his stately country mansion, Gosford Park, for a hunting party.  The guests, mostly landed gentry living well beyond their means, include a business associate, Commander Meredith, who is about to be ruined by Sir William, and Lady Trentham, a relative who depends on an allowance which Sir William intends to cut off.  The well-known singer and film star Ivor Novello is accompanied by an American film producer Morris Weissman, who hopes to use the visit to gather material for his next Charlie Chan movie.  It is evident to all that relations between Sir William and his wife Lady McCordle are not as harmonious as they might be, and Lady McCordle has no qualms over sleeping with Weissman's young valet Henry Denton, who is soon revealed to be an American actor.  Lady Trentham's maid Mary finds herself attracted to Parks, the valet of Lord Stockbridge, and commiserates with the fact that he grew up in an orphanage.  The evening after the shoot, the guests are relaxing in the drawing room when a scream rings out from the library.  Lady Stockbridge has just found Sir William sprawled over his desk, stabbed to death...