***/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Kristin Scott Thomas, Stephen Fry, Emily Watson, Ryan Phillippe
screenplay by Julian Fellowes
directed by Robert Altman
by Walter Chaw A thematic continuation of The Player‘s violent iconoclasm, Robert Altman takes on the very British “Upstairs, Downstairs” class struggle in Gosford Park, a film that resolves itself as another full-frontal assault on the Hollywood studio system. Misanthropic, smug, and pessimistic, it behaves like an Agatha Christie chamber mystery, complete with secretive service staff, bumbling policemen, and the usual upper-crust suspects, but it’s ultimately little more than an unavoidable homage to Renoir’s The Rules of the Game and a dig at a system outside of which Altman eternally finds himself. Thankfully, Gosford Park more resembles the genre-bending Altman of Kansas City than the truculently proselytizing Altman of Dr. T & the Women.
In Gosford Park, the tradition of giving new names to “the help” for the duration of their stay is upheld during a weekend of pheasant hunting, wheedling, and research for the latest Charlie Chan movie at a British country manor circa 1932. Similarly, all of the film’s characters take on allegorical identities connecting them with archetypes out of Old Hollywood: the despotic head of the studio is the monstrous Sir William McCordle (Michael Gambon); the Norma Desmond Maggie Smith’s trenchant Countess of Trentham; the imperial starlet McCordle’s exhausted wife Sylvia (Kristen Scott Thomas); the opportunistic ingénue head maid Elsie (Emily Watson); the sexually omnivorous leading man, young Henry Denton (Ryan Phillippe); and so on. The mansion itself is a snarled labyrinth of corridors and stairways. Each closed door hides a past injury or fresh perversion, bottles labelled “poison” the chief decoration amongst the lush hangings and decadent décor. The metaphorical value of the mansion and its occupants, poisonous or otherwise, is so leaden and overbearing it comes as no surprise that the only pure character, the absurdly virginal (and thus appropriately named) Mary (Kelly Macdonald), eternally finds herself lost within its glowering confines.
Like Mulholland Drive, Gosford Park shows the broken promise of Hollywood through the eyes of an evolving Eve type gradually burdened by the knowledge of good and evil as it drops from Tinseltown’s twisted bough. As Mary comes to solve the second-act murder mystery (shades of Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express crossed with Ten Little Indians) at contretemps to the squabbling help, the bumbling constabulary (Stephen Fry), and the feckless blue-bloods, she uncovers the rot at the heart of an antiquated British caste subbing for the venality of Hollywood producers and their attendant retinue of hangers-on, sycophants, whores, and speculators.
Gosford Park has 25 separate storylines that cover nearly every convention of the British period melodrama. Surprise bastards, secret lineages, surreptitious couplings, attempted rapes, squabbling nouveau riche, gee-gawing Americans, consorting with the help, Sir William in the library with a knife and poison, dead pheasants, and an all-too-brief appearance by Derek Jacobi. All combine in an Altman soup to produce a few tidy revelations, a few deliberately loose threads, and a couple of wailing ululations from broken innocents. Altman’s unblinking voyeurism and penchant for allowing his casts the latitude to improvise at length (hallmarks of the director at his best: the operatic dissection of social discomfort) are well served by Gosford Park‘s extraordinary cast. Discounting Phillippe and Camilla Rutherford as the McCordles’ glassy-eyed daughter, the players in Altman’s bitter parable are to a one magnificent. Maggie Smith, the amazing Emily Watson, Jeremy Northam, Richard E. Grant, and Eileen Atkins each deserve singular praise, and, most welcome perhaps to an erstwhile fan, Kristin Scott Thomas returns to form as the brittle Lady Sylvia after two too many wilting love-interest turns in bloated mainstream vanity pieces.
Gosford Park is ultimately no Nashville. It lacks that masterpiece’s objectivity, anecdotal nature, and uncompromising honesty, though it retains its subtext of an old guard under siege by a creeping tenderfoot revolt. (Drawing, all the while, the director’s favourite surreptitious parallels to arch-nemesis Hollywood.) It is too conventional by far, straitjacketed by the sort of visual jokes that Altman revels in (remember Glenn Close getting caught with her hand in a literal cookie jar in Cookie’s Fortune?), utilized here to foreshadow and telegraph rather than wink and nudge. One thing that should not happen in an Altman is the ability to leap ahead–if Altman were entirely honest in his statement that “it’s not a whodunit, it’s a ‘who cares?’,” he would’ve made Gosford Park less about the epiphany-laden mystery resolution of its final third and more about Mary getting swallowed up by the grey beast of fame like some aproned Barbara Jean. Still, following with Altman’s recent propensity for alternating a bad movie and a good one, Gosford Park is beautiful to look at, deliciously nasty, and buoyant for its ensemble. A good if flawed Altman film is still a minor cause for celebration. Originally published: December 26, 2001.
THE DVD
by Bill Chambers Gosford Park is the first title from the extinct USA Films to be distributed on home video by Universal, who have afforded it their “Collector’s Edition” treatment on DVD. If nothing else the disc’s muddy, bleary 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen image bears out that transcribing Altman–any Altman–onto the silver circle is a dicey proposition. (See: McCabe & Mrs. Miller.) Gosford Park‘s 5.1 Dolby Digital mix, on the other hand, warrants few complaints–the dialogue sounds crisp and there are omnipotent rain effects that practically affect psychosomatic pneumonia.
There are two commentaries aboard the DVD, the first by Altman and an uncredited voice I gather belongs to producer David Levy, the second by Julian Fellowes, author of the film’s Academy Award-winning screenplay. Altman is rather dry and aimless in his observations–I have a feeling that Gosford Park is just too fresh in his mind (he’s at his sharpest when speaking through the veil of nostalgia). Fellowes is an animated and informative chap, though a 24-minute “Cast and Filmmakers Q&A” (recorded at the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences) elsewhere on the platter is preferable to either yak-track. (Joining the director and writer on the Academy panel are Helen Mirren, Levy, Kelly Macdonald, Jeremy Northam, Bob Balaban, and, at the last minute, Ryan Philippe, who’s asked the single lamest question of the evening.)
A 20-minute block of 15 deleted scenes (mostly “sentimental stuff”) complete with optional commentary from Altman that crosses the line into insipid on occasion, the above-average USA Films-produced featurettes “The Making of Gosford Park” (20 mins.) and the “The Authenticity of Gosford Park” (in which the three retired servants hired as ettiquette consultants on the film are interviewed; 8 mins.), cast and filmmaker filmographies, a promo for Gosford Park‘s soundtrack CD, and trailers for Gosford Park and Apollo 13, The Family Man, Patch Adams, and K-Pax–the latter four with additional DVD previews–round out the disc.
138 minutes; R; 2.35:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1; English, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Universal
