It takes over an hour for someone to ask the most important question at the heart of Robert Altman’s acerbic murder mystery Gosford Park: “Why do we spend our time living through them?” This is a question asked by Elsie (Emily Watson), the head-housemaid at Sir William McCordle’s estate, and she’s right to ask it, but there’s a hint of irony embedded within it: she was Sir William’s mistress, or one of them, at least. These are the kinds of relationships Altman’s antepenultimate film, which smuggles an Agatha Christie love letter inside a two-plus hour roasting of British high society in sharp, post-Great Depression decline. Our film’s wide ensemble is split into two camps — the Above Stairs guests, and the Below Stairs staff — but as the film makes clear, these designations are never quite as clear as their societal hunger for control would allow.
Admittedly, nothing about Gosford Park reinvents the wheel — and truly, that’s the point. It’s as though Altman, less than a year off from the absolutely abysmal >Dr. T & the Women, was saving all his creative energies for Gosford Park. It’s yet another classic Altman ensemble, but with far, far fewer scenes of people talking over each other. This is polite society — rudeness like that just isn’t done. Everything about it just works, from its gargantuan cast of highly powerful British heavyweights to its lovingly dated aesthetic, the latter of which really ties everything about the film together. They really don’t make movies like this anymore; despite being released in 2001, every frame of the film has the soft warm glow of a BBC murder mystery show, a brash choice for a movie that opened in the same month as Monster’s Ball, The Fellowship of the Ring and Black Hawk Down. Even the film’s opening scene, in which people load up a car and drive to the titular estate, seems thoroughly dated; the long shot of the car approaching Gosford Park could have been cut out of anything older than David Suchet’s Poirot.
Your mileage may vary on whether this flavor of Upstairs, Downstairs pastiche works for you, but it’s hard to say they didn’t put their whole backs into it. Gosford Park is a beautiful convergence of talents, with Bob Balaban (who also plays loudmouth American director Morris Weissman) and first-time screenwriter, longtime actor Julian Fellowes, who was able to use his knowledge of how country houses worked. That expertise was more than appreciated outside of Altman, it seems: it provided Fellowes with the jumping-off point required to create his own show, Downton Abbey. (Those familiar with the monumentally successful BBC series will recognize that Smith is reprising her Gosford Park role as the Dowager Countess.) It takes a talented team to pull of a film this jam-packed with characters you really wouldn’t want to know while also keeping them engaging, but despite feeling the urge to slap the hell out of Raymond Stockbridge (Charles Dance) for telling his sister-in-law, “Do stop snivelling – anyone would think you were Italian!” you can’t help but want to see him say even more terrible, cutting things to everyone around him.
It can be very easy to lose the thread on the who’s who of it all, the myriad connections spiderwebbing out in a way that almost makes keeping it straight an unsung skill required of the maids, butlers and other staff of the upper crust guests at the party. Constance, the Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith), essentially spells this out amidst a particularly fruitful gossip session: “One thing I don’t look for in a maid is discretion – except with my own secrets, of course.” These relationships are built on a house of cards; they only associate with each other because of the status they gain by associating with each other, and seem to all be in a perpetual state of betraying someone else, somehow. The death of their host, Sir William (played by the perfectly grouchy Michael Gambon) opens the floodgates, and the animosities of the party guests begin to bubble up and spit white-hot passive-aggression (heavy on aggression) all over each other.
Where Gosford Park begins to deviate from the expected behavior of a murder mystery is in the fact that it’s just plain and simply very, very funny, even when it isn’t. There are many moments that are meant to be, like “It’s so unfair! Nobody liked him!” or the overconfident bumblings of Stephen Fry’s Inspector Thompson, but a lot of the comedy comes from the simple act of watching the wealthy attempting to cling onto a way of life that was slowly, but steadily, vanishing before their very eyes. Gander at the way the staff at Gosford Park grow mad with confusion and judgment as it’s revealed that Weissman is — gasp! — a vegetarian! “He’s very full of himself, I must say. Doesn’t eat meat? He’s coming to a shooting party and he doesn’t eat meat!” grumbles the cook, Mrs. Croft. It’s as though every character in this film is doing an elaborate song and dance, their smiles masking the fact that they’ll lose grip on the act at any second, sending their whole world into chaos.
As one of the final films of Robert Altman’s life, Gosford Park still stands tall as one of his best films. To an outsider, Altman seemed to love making movies more than anything in this world, and watching what he was capable of in his late 70s is, honestly, kind of inspiring. Even more impressive is the fact that a Southern American director in his late 70s could, with some help from his friends, create a movie that captured the essence of the snobbish circles of another continent, another country, another world. If you’re no fan of the classic whodunnit, Gosford Park won’t change your mind — but even if it doesn’t, it’s sure fun to watch British socialites reckoning with the decay of their social pecking order.
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