A Stroll through the Park
Written: Jan 09 '02 (Updated Jan 12 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Characters, Direction, Humor
Cons: Plot
The Bottom Line: The most effeminate murder mystery I’ve seen. Not that that’s a bad thing.
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| greenboat's Full Review: |
Gosford Park is billed as a highbrow murder mystery. That’s why I went to see it. As it turns out, the film plays more like a Jane Austen novel.
“Oh, come off it!” my Uncle said, “These days everything and a tomato are compared to a Jane Austen novel.” But in this case, I believe the comparison is valid because the movie is about relationships, and rich Brits who think they are the center of the universe, and tea. Tea really isn’t central to the film, but it represents the characters’ fluffy attitude toward life.
Even though there’s little murder or mystery to this film, I went to see it for the murder mystery, so that’s what I’ll talk about first.
The film begins like Clue. In heavy rain a car stops on a road in the English countryside, and two parties meet on their way to a mansion. At the mansion, we find a bunch of wealthy guests and their servants are gathering for a weekend hunting excursion. Through clever dialogue, characters and their motives are introduced. Unlike Clue, however, the movie takes its time depicting a tangled web of relationships. By the middle of the film, before the murder occurs, the characters are all very real. With sex and money, tensions run high, and the audience is dressed for a murder to carve things into chaos.
But it doesn’t. The fuse is lit with the murder, but the plot’s a dud. The real mystery in Gosford Park is not ‘whodunit,’ but ‘whocares.’ Besides an initial shriek when the body is found, nobody in the house seems to give a hoot about the murder. At least, they don’t care about the slaying—-all they think about are the implications of the thing. After the killing, there’s no suspense among the guests. No fear that death lingers in the house, waiting for another victim to prey on. It’s almost as if the person who was murdered just keeled over naturally, and the only concern is how the death will affect the characters’ lives. A day after the discovery of the body, the characters are back to their normal routine—-the charming British film star, Ivor Novello (played by Jeremy Northam), returns to entertaining the guests with simple 1930s ballads on the piano. At the end of the film, every character but one is content to go away not knowing who did it.
As an audience member, I did care about who did it. That is, after all, why I bought the ticket. But the movie takes the pleasure out of solving the mystery. There’s never much doubt about who did the stabbing, and any other secrets that might have been discovered slowly, like taking off layers of a lover’s clothes, are dished out like an army ration of mashed potatoes.
Because I went to see a murder mystery, I was disappointed. But there are other elements to the movie that make it enjoyable anyway. The direction is artful. The camera is always slowly moving and peeking through trees or behind corners to give the audience a voyeur’s view of the unfolding story—-if only the story was compelling!
The cast is on. Each character knows who he or she is, and the actors wear their parts like well-tailored suits. If only the story was compelling.
The division between the “Above Stairs” and the “Below Stairs”—-the rich and their servants-—is fascinating and adds complexity to the conflict. Rich confront rich, servants confront servants, and rich and servants clash with each other. The cast is stirred into a thick, boiling soup. It would have played out marvelously, if only the story was compelling.
There’s some good humor. Stephen Fry has a great cameo as Inspector Thomp---, Lady Trentham (Maggie Smith) has a few good digs at less fortunate guests, and the whole character of Hollywood producer Morris Weissman is funny to the point of pathos. Much of the humor in this film comes from how self-absorbed and out of touch with reality the characters are. In this way, the film resembles the Christopher Guest classics Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show.
At the end of Gosford Park, the movie was still a mystery to me-—I was still trying to figure out how the marketing team could pass it off as a mystery when the murder is only a secondary plot device through which characters of wealthy 1930s England are developed. If you’re in the mood for an Austen-like portrait of people, see this film. But if you’re in the mood for a good comic murder mystery—-I was—-you’d be better off renting Clue or Sleuth or Charade, or reading an Agatha Christie book.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
greenboat
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Location: Lost
Reviews written: 15
Trusted by: 18 members
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Every man's filth smells sweet to him. -Erasmus
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