The human ego is a marvelously complex thing, and in Gosford Park you'll get to see about 40 of them barely bridled by the societal reigns we out here in the general public largely accept as a given.
What's fascinating about Gosford Park - and it's best to be brief about this muddled and murky movie - is director Robert Altman's famed ability for getting inside the skulls of the people he is filming: the ego has virtually become the focus of his life's work. What's not so fascinating is the storyline he worked out with actor Bob Balaban (who also produced the film) and turned over to Julian Fellowes, another actor, for writing.
Set in a tweed-invested English country house in 1932; Gosford Park is ostensibly about a shooting party weekend with uppercrust guests and their servants. What's its really about, however, are the secrets and neuroses of the characters; these people are so complicated you can feel the murk, the heaviness, in the air. (And see it: cinematographer Andrew Dunn has shot everything through a haze that makes even breathing in this movie seem like a major to-do.)
Actors love this sort of thing. When plot is on the back-burner and character is on the front, they can really get deep into their psyches and pull up things that probably shock the hell out of them while they are in character. That shock can really jolt us in the audience. It certainly does in Gosford Park watching Kirsten Scott-Thomas, who plays an unhappy woman of priviledge, and Emily Watson, who plays an unhappy woman of servitude. Both are sharing the same man, who is later murdered, Agatha Christie-style.
Scott-Thomas and Watson pull off some amazingly fearless revelations from their souls, and the shock we feel is the shock of recognition. Both of them are great actors and they are at the top of their craft here.
Sad to say, nearly all of the other actors don't go nearly as far. Many of them sink into silly surface tricks and gestures; they don't get as honest as Scott-Thomas and Watson do. To be fair, some of the actors are saddled with bad writing, as is the case with Helen Mirren, who can be fantastic and who has the pivotal role here as a long-suffering servant with a BIG class-struggle based secret. Instead, she's called upon to react predictably to the big bombshell moment at the end of the film.
That Robert Altman, at the age of 70, can still stage this sort of whirling-plates movie with his practiced eye and draw performances out of actors like Kirstin Scott-Thomas and Emily Watson is a major revelation. But it doesn't top the peak of his career some 20 years ago, when he made gold out of straw with his devestating film version of the play Come Back to the Five & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. It was then that Altman discovered not only is the human ego a marvelously complex thing, but a marvelously fragile complex thing as well.
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