Gosford Park
Cooper, Rand Richards
Rand Richards Cooper SCREEN CLASS ACTION Altman's 'Gosford Park' Robert Altaian seems an unlikely director for Gosford Park. How could the sensibility behind a film as sprawling and wild as...
...And the aristocrats in turn continually press their servants for the latest gossip below...
...The credits at film's end divides the cast into "Above the Stairs" and "Below the Stairs," and Gosford Park's main business is exploring the insults and intrigues of class...
...The real violence inheres in the very structure of society, and in personalities-the mur-derousness of sharks like the Countess of Trentham, whose every utterance is at some deep level an assault...
...Jennings...
...The head housekeeper, Mrs...
...It's this dynamism that gives his films their particular quality of constant motion...
...For all the contemporary feel of his films, he's really a nineteenth-century novelist among directors: He gets the individual, and he gets society...
...And so, come Oscar time, Gosford Park will prove itself right by not winning...
...The only sin is indiscretion...
...Altman and his screenwriter, Julian Fellowes, portray the insolent free-ness with which the bluebloods talk in front of the servants, and the arrogant arbitrariness of power, as when Smith's Countess Trentham commands Mary to wash a shirt for her in the middle of the night-then decides, come next morning, not to wear it after all...
...Very tricky...
...Altaian's view of human nature has been called pessimistic, even misanthropic, but that's misleading...
...Their characters' depravity becomes our delight...
...Miller, Short Cuts, The Player, Nashville- present a brand of cinematic art keyed perfectly to the raucous free-for-all of American society, to what poet Delmore Schwartz once called "the scrimmage of appetite all around...
...Wilson (Helen Mirren), briskly summons other servants by their masters' names, and seats them at the kitchen dinner table according to their masters' eminence...
...Isn't that too tame, too mannered, too British...
...There's even a butler, Jennings (Alan Bates)-though it seems unlikely that he did it...
...Significantly, the outsider, Weissman, is a Jewish Hollywood producer of Charlie Chan movies who intends to set his next movie on an English estate...
...There are motives aplenty for murder...
...that makes them so-well, dynamic...
...Eventually, when a murder occurs, it's almost as an afterthought...
...The head butler, Jennings, fidgets uncomfortably when Weissman calls him "Mr...
...Perhaps the most chilling moment in Gosford Park occurs when a servant "accidentally" spills hot tea on the lap of a guest who has slighted him, and Maggie Smith's Countess of Trentham, sitting nearby, chortles in quiet spasms of mirth, betraying her deep pleasure in malice...
...The film is mostly talk...
...Class means knowing-and accepting-your place, even if your place is standing in a downpour outside a parked car, like the servant Mary (Kelly Macdonald), helping milady (Maggie Smith), sitting snug and dry inside, open a martini shaker...
...With their ensemble dramas, interconnecting plots, and trademark overlapping dialogue, his best movies-M*A*S*H*, McCabe and Mrs...
...He's not interested in just the end effects of class, but in the ordering mechanism itself: he wants to depict class in action, as it were...
...And no one knows better than Altman what that means for art-remember those writers in The Player pitching their movies to studio execs...
...But, of course, something is wrong in Hollywood...
...Gosford Park has its faults...
...at Gosford Park, it's a given...
...Nice trick...
...These people have motives, but don't really need them...
...Gosford Park serves up a murder, but it's really about the death throes of an entire order: pre-WWII, English, country, aristocratic...
...there's a great scene in which the entire staff stands outside the drawing room door, swooning, while one handsome houseguest, the noted actor Ivor Novello (Jeremy Northam), sings at the piano...
...the outsider, Weissman, asks the piano-playing actor, Novello...
...Most invisible of all are the servants...
...they are their own motives...
...Those who have it, use it, with condescension and casual disdain for those on the receiving end...
...A lesser director would have focused Gosford Park-would have chosen Mary or some other servant as a point-of-view character, then given us her struggle against inequity...
...No misanthrope could be as fascinated by misanthropy as Airman is...
...Finally, Altaian is a genius at scale...
...It's Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman....It's Ghost meets The Manchurian Candidate...
...The setup is pure Agatha Christie, which is to say, Jane Austen plus a murder...
...There are bottles of poison in the kitchen...
...the cast is so large that keeping track of secondary characters proves arduous...
...Nice trick.ning...
...When the lone outsider at the party, an American movie producer (Bob Bal-aban) introduces himself to Lord Stock-bridge (Charles Dance) with a nasal "Hello, I'm Morris Weissman," the debonair lord, majestically baffled, answers, "Who...
...The lords and ladies provide an ongoing soap opera for the servants, who are alternately peeved and awed...
...So too with Alt-man...
...Where the violence of American society sits right on the surface, in 1930s England it's all buried, embedded deep in the tissue of class, and you can feel Altman's glee in wielding the knife...
...Power in America is a grab...
...no one loves us and loathes us as well...
...The new American dispensation will be meritocratic, yes, but vulgar, a culture of mass entertainment...
...Gosford Park isn't really a whodunit, but a study in manners and morals...
...The murder itself, which appropriately combines poisoning and stabbing, is merely an expression of the prevailing social Darwinism...
...Altman gets that struggle, but doesn't limit himself to it...
...Altman is arguably the American director of our time...
...Remember Henry Gibson's character in Nashville...
...Airman anatomizes hierarchical social relations, where seemingly rigid boundaries sponsor a permanent culture of transgression, small and large-from Jennings surreptitiously licking his finger after pouring Bloody Marys, to Lady Sylvia (Kristin Scott Thomas) indulging a coldly businesslike tryst with a handsome young servant...
...the tying-up of plot strands comes across as both perfunctory and far-fetched...
...How do you put up with these people...
...A bumbling inspector, played by Steven Fry, intrudes a note of silly farce...
...But these are quibbles...
...The whole thing seems way wrong, until you see the movie, which is way right...
...Class means knowing who's invisible...
...No other director has so sure a grasp of both micro and macro, the private and the public...
...The movie is a gem in a less-than-sparkling season, and if Altman doesn't pick up a Best Director Oscar-he has already won both the New York Film Critics Circle and Golden Globe awards- then something is wrong in Hollywood...
...Or-worse-love...
...He's too interested in people, too exhilarated by the sheer craziness of their brazen assertions of self...
...Yet what bubbles away below the stairs is hardly revolution...
...His overlapping dialogue, for instance, merges private tete-a-tetes into the collective social babble...
...American-style egalitarianism can only spoil the party at Gosford Park...
...Sexual liaisons across class lines are a fact of life, especially with the notoriously lecherous Sir William around...
...You forget," he answers...
...eavesdropping, we learn who is beholden to whom, who covets what, who has a secret assignation where...
...I earn my living by impersonating them...
...it throws sand in the gears of the social machine...
...No one else gets the allure, the excess, the danger, and the energy of this country like Altman...
...Difficult color, that green," she says, eyeing another woman's dress...
...With his signature mix of the hilarious and the ferocious, the seventy-six-year-old director has kept a steady bead on the wildly moving target of American life...
...Life at Gosford Park, on the other hand, seems at first glance hardly to move at all...
...A dozen guests gather at the country home of Sir William Mc-Cordle (Michael Gambon) for a weekend of dining, cigars, entertainments, and a pheasant shoot...
...And the upstairs-downstairs relation proves far more flexible and complex than it seems...
...It's as if a fly has spoken...
...A servant's life consists of a thousand such cuts...
...It's the magic trick all artists pull off, and satirists especially...
...we understand that he represents the future, and it's going to be the American future, the Hollywood future...
...How could the sensibility behind a film as sprawling and wild as Nashville possibly cram itself into the small-genre box of a period-piece murder mystery set on an English country manor in 1932...
...How could he possibly be engaged in conversation with someone named Morris Weissman...
Vol. 129 • February 2002 • No. 3
