Full of Baronial Splendor and Hatefulness
New York Times, December 26, 2001

By Stephen Holden

ROBERT ATLMAN'S FILM "Gosford Park" is a melt-in-your-mouth hunk of 12-layer English spice cake that will appeal to anyone who feels a nostalgic pang for the long-running British television series "Upstairs Downstairs," or for the cozy whodunits of Agatha Christie. Made with an all-star, mostly British cast, it is a virtuoso ensemble piece to rival the director's "Nashville" and "Short Cuts" in its masterly interweaving of multiple characters and subplots.
The film, set in November 1932, takes place on a grand country estate where well over a dozen aristocrats and their servants gather for a weekend shooting party during which their host, Sir William McCordle (Michael Gambon), is murdered. The mystery genre lends "Gosford Park" a tidy symmetry lacking in earlier Altman epics, but it also forces the movie to fall into a formula.
Anglophiles will gleefully wallow in the baronial splendor of the setting and in the movie's canny eye for period detail, including everything from dinner place settings to vintage cars to the rituals of the shoot. The performances, for the most part, are so pitch-perfect that you needn't pay close attention to the film's complicated plot to have
fun. English snobbery and class envy have always provided vicarious enjoyment when ogled from a safe distance. The vision of Maggie Smith as Constance, the Countess of Trentham, peering down her nose while dispensing barbed little pearls of imperious condescension and cruelty to one and all is almost sinfully delicious.
So is the sight of Kristin Scott Thomas as Sir William's icy wife, Lady Sylvia. Early in the movie we learn that she and her younger sister, Louisa (Geraldine Somerville), cut cards to determine which of the two, who come from an impoverished but titled family, would snag Sir William, a self-made millionaire described by one character as "a hardhearted randy old sod."
If Sir William thinks nothing of pawing at every young woman who catches his fancy, Lady Sylvia, who disdainfully mocks her husband for being interested only in money and fiddling with his guns, has a more discreetly roving eye. Setting her sights on a handsome young valet (Ryan Phillippe), she zeroes in with the predatory sang-froid of the truly entitled. When she requests delivery of a glass of warm milk at 1 a.m., at which time she promises to be "wide awake," there is no mistaking what she wants.
On the surface "Gosford Park" may appear to be little more than an elaborate, star-studded PBS-ready mystery yarn. But under its opulent surface it is programmatically subversive of the very thing it pretends to be. "Upstairs Downstairs," you may recall, was a reassuring Edwardian soap opera in which the beneficent ruling class dispensed noblesse oblige to the true-blue servants, and everybody was reasonably settled and happy.
"Gosford Park," which was written by Julian Fellowes from a concept by Mr. Altman and the actor Bob Balaban, portrays a similar milieu as a Darwinian shark tank of money grubbing, social climbing and scurrilous gossip in which upstairs and downstairs are treacherously intertwined.
Those with titles might be described as the idle (and embittered) not-so-rich. One aristocrat who has married money, has already squandered his wife's inheritance and having no use for her any longer, now despises her. Another, who faces financial ruin, desperately pleads with Sir William to invest in his ridiculous scheme to sell boots to the Sudanese.
For all her grand airs, the Countess of Trentham (who is Lady Sylvia's aunt) is dependent for her livelihood on an allowance from Sir William, which he threatens to take away. Sir William's fortune didn't come from banking but from factories that are described as sweatshops, in which he relentlessly preyed on his young female workers.
The pains of World War I, which ended 14 years earlier, still throb. Those who fought that war wear a halo of valor, while a secret shame accrues to those who did not. Hatreds and rivalries abound both upstairs and below, and sexual shenanigans cross class boundaries. They are pretty much taken for granted as long as discretion is maintained. The movie's truth teller and most likable character, Elsie (Emily Watson), is the head housemaid whose affair with Sir William is common knowledge, although it is never spoken of.
The movie throws in a hall-of-mirrors wrinkle in its choice of three of the guests: a discreetly gay American movie producer, Morris Weissman (Mr. Balaban), researching his newest movie, "Charlie Chan in London"; his ambitious, bisexual boyfriend, Henry Denton (Mr. Phillippe), an actor posing as a Scottish valet; and the English matinee idol Ivor Novello (Jeremy Northam). Novello was a real-life movie star who also composed numerous English hit songs in a NoÎl Coward style. A running subtext of the film is the collision and mutual exploitation of two far-flung fantasy worlds: aristocratic England and Hollywood.
As much as the presence of a movie star and a Hollywood producer titillates some of the aristocrats, they also envy and look down on their American guests, wearing their snobbery as armor. Mr. Balaban's producer has some of the screenplay's most telling lines about the relationship between these two worlds.
"How do you put up with these people?" Weissman asks Novello, who replies with a smile, "You forget I earn my living by impersonating them." When Novello sits at the piano and sings his songs evoking the upper-class milieu as a charmed never-never land of romance and wit, the servants practically swoon, while the aristocrats affect utter disinterest. When Weissman is discussing casting on the telephone to Hollywood, the name Claudette Colbert is dropped, and he asks, "Is she affected or is she British?"
When it comes to portraying the upper class, "Gosford Park" succeeds in having its cake and eating it too. While demolishing the "Upstairs Downstairs" myth of kindness toward those of lower station, it allows these jaded, chilly malcontents to retain a patina of supercilious glamour.
In the spirit of democracy, the movie is as attentive to its downstairs characters as to those upstairs. Helen Mirren is especially fine as the head housekeeper, Mrs. Wilson, a woman so resigned to her lot in life that she is able to say proudly and with only a trace of bitterness: "I'm the perfect servant. I have no life." As Mrs. Croft, who runs the kitchen and carries on a bitter rivalry with Mrs. Wilson, Eileen Atkins is equally incisive.
"Gosford Park" is far more satisfying as social satire than as a mystery. To foreshadow a crime, the camera lingers portentously on bottles labeled "poison." And when murder is committed, the movie resorts to the cliche of photographing a suspect from the knees down. The criminal investigation is perfunctory, and the police inspector (Stephen Fry) the movie's least compelling character. The final revelations, when they pour out, feel like the hoary contrivances of a 19th-century melodrama.
But when "Gosford Park" is not adhering to a formula, which is most of the time, it is at the top its game. The screenplay is so amazingly concise that if you watch the film more than once (which I would advise), you'll find barely a word has been wasted. Almost every sentence conveys crucial information, but in a deceptively off-hand style that's so light it feels like casual banter. And the director's trademark style of overlapping dialogue that is never "speechy" in a theatrical sense adds to the overall sense of naturalness.
What makes the achievement of "Gosford Park" all the more remarkable is that Mr. Altman is 76. If the movie's cool assessment of the human condition implies the dispassionate overview of a man who has seen it all, the energy that crackles from the screen suggests the clear- sighted joie de vivre of an artist still deeply engaged in the world.

© New York Times, 2001

"Gosford Park" has appeared on the end-of-year "Ten Best" lists of a number of film critics. Here are comments from two of the New York Times reviewers:

"IN HIS BEST movie since "Short Cuts," Robert Altman turns the conventions of the English country house murder mystery inside out, offering a piquant anatomy of class divisions and imperial decadence. At 76, Mr. Altman has not lost a step, and he directs with the exuberance of a passionate entomologist who has just discovered a curious new species of ant." -A.O. Scott, 23 December 01

"ROBERT ALTMAN'S FINEST film in years is a triumph of ensemble acting for a mostly British cast that includes almost everyone who's anyone. The sociologically acute vision of upstairs-downstairs relationships at an English country estate in 1932 is also a whodunit spilling over with juicy revelations and family secrets." - Stephen Holden, 23 December 01

The New York Film Critics Circle has given its award for best director to Robert Altman for "Gosford Park," which opened on Dec. 26. It also received awards for best supporting actress, Helen Mirren, and best screenplay, by Julian Fellowes.

The awards are to be presented on Jan. 6 at the Russian Tea Room. A donation on behalf of the critics' group was made to the Coalition for the Homeless, using money that would have gone to Windows on the World, where the ceremony was to have been held. The restaurant was destroyed in the attacks on Sept. 11.

PARTY PIECE
An old master on top form
from The Economist, December 2001

KING OF THE Hollywood independents for more than 30 years, Robert Altman has turned for the first time to a quintessentially old-world subject in "Gosford Park", a comedy-drama played out over a country-house weekend reminiscent of Jean Renoir's pre-war "La Regle du Jeu" and Ken Loach's "The Gamekeeper". It is one of his best works, recalling the magisterial control of huge casts and multiple plot threads in his masterworks, "Nashville" (1975) and "Short Cuts" (1993).
A perfect insider-outsider, Mr Altman seems in his films to draw about equally from movies and from life. He was born in 1925 in Kansas City, where he grew up, and went to Jesuit school, in its jazz heyday. A bomber pilot in the war and an engineering graduate afterwards, he has worked prolifically in film ever since, using the camera in endlessly inventive ways. He knows the genres of Hollywood backwards, and enjoys turning them inside out. He has made hits ("M*A*S*H", 1970) and flops ("Popeye", 1980). Detractors find his humour bitter or his lengths a bore. But nobody quarrels with his ability to create and people screen worlds--which is what he has again done so well in "Gosford Park".
As he did in "A Wedding" (1978), Mr Altman focuses on a single event--a 1932 shooting party at a country house, to which family and high society are invited. There are 50 speaking parts, played by the cream of British acting, from Michael Gambon and Maggie Smith to Kristin Scott Thomas and Charles Dance. Mirroring them are the below-stairs contingent, just as prodigally cast--Alan Bates, Helen Mirren, Emily Watson, Richard E. Grant, Derek Jacobi and many more. There is not a weak performance. The fun of the film lies in Mr Altman's intuitive grasp of interwar manners and class distinctions. The script is by a British actor, Julian Fellowes, and the director never misses a social trick.
As Joseph Losey did in "The Servant", an American isolates the cruel rigidity of class better perhaps than the British would themselves. In a telling scene, the servants finally eat after attending to the upper crust. Alan Bates, as the butler, places them at table in the same social ranking as their individual lords and masters.
There are uncertainties in the film, however, elements that at first seem out of true until it is revealed how these, too, fit in. The only foreign guest is Bob Balaban's small-time Hollywood movie producer, whose forte is Charlie Chan detective thrillers (a pre-echo of the route "Gosford Park" will later take). His valet (Ryan Phillippe) has an over-the-top Scottish accent unrecognisable even to Scots. Explaining his role would give the game away.
His nonchalance is matched by Clive Owen as Charles Dance's valet. While the other British servants are deferential, his arrogance nears insubordination. How does he get away with it? What is his motive? And why do the cook (Eileen Atkins) and the housekeeper (Helen Mirren) resemble each other? All three are related in ways that shed new light on what goes on at Gosford Park.
Mr Altman keeps the party moving with his stylistic trademark, a prowling CinemaScope camera, enabling one strand to merge into another and take the narrative almost imperceptibly in another direction. Gliding through the film is Jeremy Northam, as playwright, songsmith and matinÈe idol Ivor Novello. He is a kind of chorus, whose songs underscore the theme. (Mr Northam's beguiling light tenor suggests that he could, if he'd wanted, have had a different career.)
"Gosford Park" is both a social satire and, odd as it sounds, a murder mystery in the style of Agatha Christie. Stephen Fry (half Poirot, half Hulot) plays a bumbling detective who misses the clues. For Kristin Scott Thomas, this fault is less grave than his adding tea to milk, not milk to tea.
Surprisingly, this coda fits well with the main theme. A murder takes place, but as investigations proceed, it becomes clear that to these weekend guests, the whodunit is irrelevant. The killer is never caught (though the audience finds out who it is) and the guests depart, to the accompaniment of one last Ivor Novello song, only momentarily foxed by an intrusion of violence from a world they regard as quite separate from theirs.

© The Economist, 2001

Gosford Park World Premiere
to Open London Film Festival
Wednesday, 7 November, 19.30, Odeon Leicester Square

From the LFF website: Inspired by both Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game and Agatha Christie's novel `Ten Little Indians', Gosford Park is legendary director Robert Altman's first British film.
On the face of it, it might seem peculiar to have this most modern of American cinema auteurs making a film about a weekend shooting party at an aristocratic stately home in the 30s. But Robert Altman has never been conventional in his choice of subject matter and this is another example of his unerring ability to be simultaneously daring and dazzling.
From the first moments of Gosford Park, the viewer is quickly made aware that this is no chocolate box period drama but instead - and far more interestingly - an ironic, emotionally telling dissection of English society between the wars. With no less than 25 interwoven storylines, involving a rich and exotic gallery of characters, Gosford Park cuts a swathe through the upstairs and downstairs of the class system. With sexual trysts aplenty, bad business dealing and skullduggery, leading to murder, there is a dark and biting edge to the absurdly comic interplay of Gosford Park's multiple plotlines.
Needless to say, Altman marshals his vivid fresco with magisterial style and cinematic gusto. Indeed, Gosford Park has all the hallmarks of his greatest work and, whilst it may be specific to its period, its breadth of vision invites comparison with his earlier movies, such as Nashville and Short Cuts. It has a number of magical scenes but, without spoiling anything, just watch out for a marvellous orchestration of film and music, when Jeremy Northam playing Ivor Novello decides to entertain the other guests.
If this were not enough, Altman and his team have assembled one of the most impressive casts of British talent to be seen in a single film in recent years. The appearances of Eileen Atkins, Bob Balaban, Alan Bates, Charles Dance, Stephen Fry, Michael Gambon, Richard E. Grant, Derek Jacobi, Kelly Macdonald, Helen Mirren, Jeremy Northam, Clive Owen, Ryan Phillippe, Maggie Smith, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Emily Watson, amongst others, are wonderful to behold, especially since every one of them gives a performance of such veracity that they truly inhabit the world of Gosford Park.
Embellished by Julian Fellowes' witty script which captures all the nuances of the characters' verbal sparring, Gosford Park is also finely photographed by Andrew Dunn, and has a subtle score from composer Patrick Doyle. It is, therefore, a great honour for us to welcome Robert Altman and his cast to the RLFF for the World Premiere of Gosford Park.

Monday January 8, 2001
Altman remake draws stellar cast

The 20-member cast of director Robert Altman's upcoming film Gosford Park has already attracted Kristen Scott Thomas, Jude Law and Emily Watson, Variety reports. Altman is basing his film on director Jean Renoir's pre-war classic La Regle du Jeu ("Rules Of The Game"), about an upper-class shooting party spending a weekend in the country and interacting with the servant class.

"It is the story of a hunting party, with a murder in a house where the masters are surrounded by numerous servants," Altman told the French paper Le Figaro. Variety said Helen Mirren and Michael Gambon also hope to join the cast of Gosford Park. A spokesman for the director told Variety: "Lots of actors want to be in the film, but it is a question of fitting it into their schedules." Shooting is scheduled to start in March in England, although financing for the project is still being lined up, Variety said.

In his 43 years of filmmaking, Altman has done 'another one' more than 30 times, generating four Oscar nominations as best director (for M*A*S*H, Nashville, The Player and Short Cuts) and carving out a niche for himself with other landmark films such as McCabe And Mrs. Miller, Three Women, Come Back To The Five And Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and The Long Goodbye.

Guardian Review 7 November 01

Daily Telegraph Altman Profile