Bad Manors

Gosford Park skewers British aristocracy — but so what?

by Sam Adams

Gosford Park

Directed by Robert Altman
A USA Films release



Class act: Michael Gambon, Emily Watson and Richard E. Grant in Gosford Park.

The dangers of making a movie about a group of vapid, self-aggrandizing people are obvious. If you embrace the characters’ frame of reference, you risk being just as vacuous and superficial as they are; if you adopt a position of moral superiority, the movie tumbles into glib pronouncements, leaving the audience no more interesting task than nodding their heads in smug accord. Robert Altman has made a career of skewering the self-involved, from the unctuous higher-ups in M*A*S*H to the oily execs of The Player to the preening fashionistas of Prêt-à-Porter. With Gosford Park, Altman has for the third time in a decade (the fourth, if you count the nattering harpies of Dr. T and the Women) set his sights on the congenitally self-involved, the kinds of people for whom no trouble is as great as their own.

Set in a cavernous English manor house in 1932, Gosford Park rakes its talons across the well-fed belly of the British aristocracy. Opening with a besodden servant (Kelly MacDonald) standing in the rain while her oblivious mistress (Maggie Smith) issues orders in a voice steeped in woe-is-me weariness, the film makes its allegiances instantly clear. Sir William (Michael Gambon), whose estate provides Gosford Park’s setting, and whose murder sets the plot in motion, is a gruff old patriarch who’s stingy with his wealth and liberal with his help — his affair with housemaid Elsie (Emily Watson) is an open secret below-stairs, and he’s used and discarded many a female employee in one of his sweatshop-like factories. Jeremy Northam plays real-life matinée idol Ivor Novello, whose presence at Sir William’s, along with an American producer of Charlie Chan movies (Bob Balaban, who devised the film’s concept along with Altman) and his obnoxious valet (Ryan Phillippe, whose dreadful Scots accent thankfully becomes a plot point), prefigures the shift from breeding to celebrity. "How do you stand these people?" asks Balaban’s producer. Replies Novello: "I make my living impersonating them."

Gosford Park never camouflages the fact that its murder mystery is a deliberate contrivance — as the servants crowd into the house (where they’re informed that, as per custom, they’ll be called by their master’s or mistress’ surname and not their own), the camera lingers over a bottle marked "Poison," a rib-jab right out of silent melodrama. (Think of it as Nashville with the gunshot, or in this case, stabbing, halfway through.) Sir William’s murder serves mainly as a device for bringing the subconscious cruelty we’ve already seen out into the light. That’s not to say that any of the assembled ladies and gentlemen begin to see the error of their ways — "I’m breaking in a new servant," sighs Smith’s countess, "Is there anything more tiresome?" — but that their eventual historical undoing becomes ever more imminent before our eyes. The way all but the most hardened of them swoon when Novello sits down to the piano to play one of his mellow little ditties, or the way Balaban’s producer keeps interrupting the proceedings with reminders that he’s expecting "a very important phone call from the coast," you can feel a new era dawning. And unlike in, say, The Remains of the Day, you don’t lament the Old World’s charms in the slightest.

To play Gosford Park’s more than three dozen roles, Altman has enlisted an assortment of talent bordering on the absurd — Kristin Scott Thomas, Alan Bates, Helen Mirren, Eileen Atkins, Derek Jacobi, Richard E. Grant, Clive Owen and Stephen Fry in addition to the above — and it’s a testimonial to Altman’s honed-to-perfection style that every one of them is allowed to distinguish him- or herself, and that Gosford Park still doesn’t tip over with the weight of three dozen bravura performances. (It’s also a wonderful little joke that the movie has as much real-life royalty downstairs as up: Dame Maggie and Sir Michael above-decks; Sir Derek and Dame Eileen below.)

As in Prêt-à-Porter or The Player, Altman’s target is not a particularly lively one; where the fashion and movie industries revel in the same excesses that the first two films sent up, the British peerage system hardly retains the strength to defend its unkind treatment here. Gosford Park is a bit like a stellar fireworks show with a damp-powder finale; every curlicue and fillip is executed beyond reproach, but to an end that hardly seems pressing. A decidedly less energetic movie than Dr. T and the Women, Gosford Park seems content to rest with the outsider’s observation that the British class system was bad, but that’s all over now, and aren’t we all better for it? That one servant’s hopeful finish finds her climbing into a London-bound car with two movie-industry smoothies (who are probably just as likely to exploit her as her former employer) is an irony that, if intended, is too soft-pedaled to give the movie its final juicy twist.