Running around GOSFORD PARK Like Geese with Their Heads Cut Off? Not Robert Altman!
Written: Feb 27 '02 (Updated May 30 '06)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Brilliant direction, setting, acting, photography and allegorical screenplay.
Cons: Altman's typical off-hand style and overlapping dialogue.
The Bottom Line: Director Altman literally breaks new ground with this murder mystery, set in England. Much in its back story applies to us today. My opinion: Best film nominated for an Oscar.
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| macresarf1's Full Review: |
PRIME SUSPECT FOR THE OSCAR?
As in the case of several films nominated for the Oscar this year, GOSFORD PARK causes some viewers and critics to clutch their forelocks and mutter, "Shallow, elitist and entirely unimportant!"
Others are throwing their heads back to shout Bravo! for a brilliant, complex period film by Old Master Bob Altman, utilizing almost all the distinguished actors of British stage, screen and televison. (The ones not here, with the exception of Helen Mirren who moonlighted, are in Fred Schepisi's LAST ORDERS.) These critics see GOSFORD PARK as Altman's third comeback, a beguiling, frothy one. One due for an Oscar.
Who is right?
The answer is that the second group comes close to the truth -- but not quite. Entertaining as it is for those viewers with the patience and receptiveness for it, and despite what even favorable critics say, GOSFORD PARK should be seen as a metaphor for the crash of our own new Gilded Age, stamped in the mold of an Imperial British country house weekend murder mystery, during the long ago Great Depression.
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OPENING MOOD AND BACKGROUND:
Based on an "idea" by Bob Balaban and Robert Altman, and scripted by actor-turned-writer, the aristocratic Julian Fellows, GOSFORD PARK begins in November 1932, as the Countess Constance of Trentham, the essence of the landed English upper class, leaves her home in heavy rain under a brolly, held by her butler Burgett, to make the drive in her vintage Rolls Royce through the English countryside to a "hunt weekend" at Gosford Park, home of her niece, Lady Sylvia McCordle. Waiting to open the car door for her, soaked by now through and through, is Mary Macreachran, her new Scottish personal maid. On the ride, the Countess wants some refreshment but is unable to unscrew the top of her thermos bottle. She has the Merriman the Chauffeur pull the car over so that Mary (riding in the open front seat beside Burgett) can come around to open it for her.
[The top pops off rather unscrews!]
While they are stopped, another car approaches.
The driver is Actor, Writer, Producer, Composer, Director Ivor Novello -- working class, gay, and Welsh but a romantic idol of his time -- who is accompanied by an American movie colleague, Movie Producer Morris Weissman and Weissman's valet. Novello is headed for the same destination as the Countess, to entertain Sir William and Lady Sylvia McCordle's house guests. Producer Weissman's ulterior purpose in finessing an invitation, we shall find, involves research for a Charlie Chan murder mystery, to be set at . . . just such an affair. (His valet Henry Denton, the kind of servant even a successful actor like Novello does not have, carries even more agendas.)
Novello asks directions and follows the car of the Countess.
Perhaps this perfunctory description of the film's opening minute or two will stand as a paradigm for scores and scores -- dare I say, scads -- of subtle, sardonic ironies, reversals of expectation, and in-jokes which stud Director Robert Altman's 38th film, his first set in Great Britain. For GOSFORD PARK, disguised as an amusing English country house murder mystery, is about the Passing of Old Orders and the Rise of New Dominions. In each case, inherent secretive relationships, returning doppelgangers, and rueful observations for our own day lurk below the brittle surface of a hoary Agatha Christie-style tale from a far-off Hertfordshire
November 1932: In Britain, the aristocracy is beginning to realize that World War I, triumph though it was for the Allies, mortally wounded the Economy of the Empire. Overseas markets, a necessity to industry, are shrinking. The War-driven National Debt, exacerbating a Balance of Payments problem, has turned Britain from the paramount creditor nation to the World's greatest debtor. The Crown has been forced to abandon the Gold Standard. Government is in disarray, and unemployment is catastrophic. In Germany, the Nazi Party has won a majority in the Reichstag. World War II is seven years away. (In 15 years, the aristocracy and the Empire will be effectively finished.)
Over in Washington, FDR has just been elected President in the wake of a dispersal of World War I Veterans by U.S. Army rifle fire and Cavalry charges, directed by soon-to-be-famous military hero, General Douglas MacArthur. (FDR will adopt populist, anti-monopoly, anti-imperialist policies, which will enrage the rich at home and overseas, until events bring him back to the Capitalist fold.) In Hollywood, the shock of the Depression has put finish to the Silent Film, and Sound is in.
The mechanization of a new Celebrity Culture is essentially complete though it will be 50 years before it changes places with the Royal Family and takes over the U.S. Presidency.
In the scene I have described in my first paragraph, part of sly old Director Altman's genius is that the "idea" for GOSFORD PARK has Dame Maggie Smith, one of the magnificent stars of British stage and screen, playing the elevated Countess Constance, but a relative newcomer, Kelly Macdonald (TRAINSPOTTING), stuck in the part of lowly Maid Mary. The genius is that although Smith steals many a scene, her role is a secondary one, while it is Miss Macdonald who essays probably the main character. (She is listed 36th in the cast list.) Further, Bob Balaban, the fictitious American movie producer, is the "idea man" and actual producer of GOSFORD PARK, and CHARLIE CHAN IN LONDON, the B-movie his character is soaking up local color for, actually was made the next year, and released in 1934, the third in a phenomenally successful series of 49 such mysteries turned out between 1929 and 1949.
[CHARLIE CHAN IN LONDON, featuring Warner Oland (a Swede) as the popular Honolulu Chinese detective, is one of two early examples of the run extant. It helped make Ray Milland a star, as GOSFORD PARK may at last elevate Clive Owen to that status.]
Born David Ivor Davies, our film's romantic matinee idol Ivor Novello (Jeremy Northam) actually existed, the only character in GOSFORD PARK who did. Known as "The British Adonis" and "The Valentino of England," he rose from humble Welsh origins to become, next to Noel Coward (of similar background), the most famous British male Musical Theater star in the thirty years following World War I. A veteran of the Royal Flying Corps, it was he who wrote "Keep the Home Fires Burning," among 250 other songs, many of them featured in the 14 plays he crafted, produced and/or directed, and the 24 productions in which he appeared.
[BTW, he gave Vivien Leigh her stage name.]
For the previous decade, prior to the time of GOSFORD PARK, Novello was an International star of 16 silent movies (e.g., Griffiths, THE WHITE ROSE, 1923), most notably Alfred Hitchcock's first signature film, THE LODGER (1926). In fact, it is the unsuccessful sound remake of THE LODGER (1932), referred to witheringly by Countess Constance at Gosford Park, which marked the virtual end of his film career. Novello had the mannerisms of a 19th Century stage actor, and the carefully manufactured accent of a British aristocrat. He was unable or unwilling to spoil his image in making a transition to sound, splendid though were his singing voice and appearance, and so, spent the rest of his career on the British stage.
Hence, he is in oblivion for American audiences. My purpose in taking so much time and space on Ivor Novello is to suggest Robert Altman's carefully scripted guerilla attack on the pretentions of class, either in the Sunset of the British Empire, or on our Nero stage of the New World Order. Altman's method is one of indirection.
For Novello, too, is a minor character in GOSFORD PARK, but he remains vital to Director Altman's ironic motivations, for none of the people encountered by the party of the aristocratic Countess or that of the posing gay romantic hero are what they seem. Neither, for that matter, is the Countess herself.
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THE POTENTIAL VICTIMS:
The Hunt Weekend is revving up as the patrician Countess Constance and the beloved Bohemian Novello with their companions arrive at the mansion.
Here, Altman divides the residents of GOSFORD PARK, "permanent" or temporary, into classes:
Firstly, the host family is led, like an officer who never served, by florid old Sir William McCordle (Michael Gambon). A tough war profiteer, who proudly owes his fortune to manufacturing boots for the troops in World War I, and his social position to his titled wife, Sir William is secretly worried that labor strife and the collapse of Colonial and American businesses are cutting into his income. He is retrenching on speculative investments, and limiting financial assistance to his impecunious noble in-laws, slashing loose the rank hangers-on.
Cool, beauteous, soignee Lady Sylvia McCordle (Kristin Scott Thomas) cut cards with her sister Louisa, it is said, over which ardent prospect she would marry, and now, frustrated, ignored, an early day "trophy wife," she is beginning to feel she lost the draw.
Daughter Isobel looks in a dreadful state because she is having a cruel, masochistic affair with a family friend, The Honorable Freddie Nesbit (James Wilby). At the same time, she is being married off, by her money-short parents, to gay young Lord Rupert Standish (Laurence Fox). Standish and his friend Jeremy Blond (Trent Ford) buzz up to Gosford Park so late, they miss First Night dinner, eat on the fly in the game room like two of our modern generation, and are scarcely seen again until the end of the movie.
The arriving Honorable Freddie (who of course is not honorable at all) pins Isobel immediately in a corner of the Grand Staircase, where they ignore an observing servant as a "nobody," but Freddie by this point is more interested in getting into Sir William's lucrative scheme to sell boots to native troops in the British Sudan than he is in placating the distraught Isobel. He is actually so poor that his winning wife, Mabel (Claudie Blakely), whose dowry has been squandered, cannot afford to bring a personal maid. (She is looked down upon and pitied for it.)
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THE PRIME GUEST SUSPECTS:
Lady Sylvia's rejected suitor, Raymond Lord Stockbridge (Charles Dance), who married her pleasant sister, Louisa (Geraldine Somerville), is also in need of money, but he dismisses with diffident banter the fact that he has hired a temp valet, Robert Parks (Clive Owen), for their visit. Lord Stockbridge represents the best of Old England and is a true war hero. Like most frontline British soldiers of his time, he modestly deprecates his service. When drunken Sir William sneeringly tells his new guests at the dinner table, "Ray was mentioned in dispatches nearly every day . . . weren't you Ray?" Stockbridge replies through a tight smile: "I did my bit." It is marvelously clear that, for personal and philosophical reasons, Stockbridge despises who Sir William is and what he represents.
Married to Sylvia's third sister, Lady Lavinia (Natasha Wightman), young Lieutenant Commander Anthony Meredith (Tom Hollander), unlike the stoical Stockbridge, proves eager to seek financial help (the boot contract proposition) from Sir William, and he is dismayed to learn that it has been scrapped by his nervous host. They argue about the matter during a sumptuous formal dinner the first night.
THE OTHER GUEST SUSPECTS:
The outer circle guests are present for the inner circle's entertainment. Novello, modest, willing and charming as he is said to have been in real life, better dressed than some of the regulars, sits down at the piano to sing one of his tunes at every interval, irritating the older members of the party, but diverting the younger ones, and distracting the servants, who listen from afar. His companion Weissman is suffered because he is a novelty of the time -- an American -- even if he confounds the staff with exotic vegetarian requirements in the midst of The Hunt. Thankfully, although a genteel anti-Semitism was rife in pre-War Britain's Upper Classes, the McCordles are too polite to mention that their guest is a Jew.
(Possibly, Novello's cloaked Welshness, often distrusted just as much in such a group, gives Weissman cover.)
More irksome to staff and hosts alike is that Weissman monopolizes the Trans-Atlantic telephone line to California, urging that the hot new Una Merkle replace unreliable Silent Star Clara Bow, and that English character actor Alan Mowbray be signed for the picture. [We can at least imagine Weissman got Mowbray because he is on CHARLIE CHAN IN LONDON's cast list.]
Have you caught enough Red Herrings yet around GOSFORD PARK?
Here are some more. Remember that the upper half of the characters in the film have accents determined by the University they attended or the Service they were in, and the other half, the servants -- while not saying "blimey" -- speak with dialects from Scotland, Ireland, Wales, the North, the Midlands and London. At times they swallow their words, mumble or say things which don't make sense. They do that because Director Altman and Writer Jullian Fellowes wanted them to do that.
Most of the characters in GOSFORD PARK, at some level, like most of us, harbor something they regret. Their lapses in speech often indicate their preoccupations.
Call these "lapses" clues, if you wish.
THE BUTLER AND OTHER SUSPECTS:
The servants are as rigidly classified and cryptically fragmented as the Masters' family or their weekend "friends," perhaps more significantly so.
Their commanding officer is Jennings the Butler (Alan Bates), who presides over the military precision of Gosford Park's operation with the dignity of a Lord. Under his proud eye, the staff moves to their duties like a deployment of superb Hussars. (But within his prideful demeanor is his secret.)
Mrs. Wilson (Helen Mirren), the Housekeeper, ranks immediately below Jennings in the hierarchy, and she oversees the Upstairs service. Her duty is to see that the other employees serve the Masters and their guests selflessly, anticipating every wish, keeping a calm, clean appearance for the mansion, preserving what was at the time a 200 year-old way of Upper Class English life. She is, as she says herself, the Perfect Servant. "I have no life." But late in the film, we discover that her statement was not always quite true.
Beneath Mrs Wilson, competent, roughly beautiful Elsie the Head Housemaid (Emily Watson), playing safety officer, checks directly all the details of bedmaking, cleaning and table setting. Elsie can hardly restrict her frankness to her own class, and she has some additional inside knowledge, beyond that of her powerful position.
Of the other Upstairs servants, the most significant is Probert, Sir William's valet. A professional in his every touch, Probert has been born and raised to service. Of all the characters in GOSFORD PARK, he is the only one who genuinely loves and cares for his master, not so much as a person but as an idealized figure to be respected. As played by Derek Jacoby, brief be the glimpses we are given, I found Probert's character the most familiar and moving, in my memory's eye.
Below stairs, Mrs. Croft the Cook (pungent stage actress, Eileen Atkins) marshals her dog soldiery of secondary cooks, kitchen and scullery maids to ensure that the soup is hot at table, the dishes clean and the butcher knives counted. For her, cigarette in hand when off duty, it is "us against them," (the various worlds of Gosford Park), so long as duties are carried out. She indeed covers for her maids should they wish to engage in hanky panky with anybody in the house. [Can one of those maids be an uncredited Ute Lemper, the renowned German cabaret singer, as Imogene?]
Then there are the guest servants. They are a mixed bag who are tolerated, as long as they know the bounds of a domestic's discipline. For efficiency's sake, they are known below stairs by the names of their masters.
Plain "Little Ma-r-y" Macreachan (Macdonald) brings a fresh Scottish eye from Glasgow to her first position, and to her first duty at a stately home on the occasion of a Hunt. We follow her orientation from Mrs. Wilson, her wanderings in the bowels of the kitchen and the back court, and her rundown of what she really has to watch out for, courtesy of Elsie (Watson), while taking a smoke or having a bath. She absorbs everything, shares some of the gossip with her mistress, Countess Constance, but keeps certain crucial observations to herself. Little Mary finds an intriguing soulmate in fellow guest servant Robert Parks (Owen).
Parks strikes the regular staff as a bit of an enigma, in that despite his likable self-confidence and good looks, he admits to being an orphan, a condition often either stigmatized or pitied in pre-World War II Britain. Parks HAS no class to call his own. At Gosford Park, a vestigial repository of The Great Chain of Being, he is truly a lost soul.
Finally, Henry Denton (Ryan Phillipe), from his first bumbling entrance into Gosford Park, wins the mistrust of nearly all. Henry does not seem to know his place, addressing his betters casually and, even worse, his ranking fellow servants; floating upstairs and down for no discernible purpose. He claims to be from Glasgow, by way of Hollywood, but the Scots among the servants think he has lost his brogue in America. They find him odd, particularly Fred the Boot Boy (Gregor Henderson-Begg), who gives skeptical examination to how well Henry is maintaining Mr. Weissman's shoes. The hardworking staff consider Henry lazy, standoffish and rude, but they do not know that he usually shares the bed of his master, and during his visit to Gosford Park, he will do that with anyone, male or female, upstairs or down.
Whipping between those upstairs and downstairs worlds comes George the First Footman (Richard E. Grant). Laconic and energetic, he sees the trunks are brought up the stairs, and the bodies are brought down. He is not above calling Sir William "a randy old sod," but generally he expresses himself with a grimace, a sideways glance or a twist of body English. If he wore a bush mustache, he could be "The Revolutionary Sailor" on BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (Eisenstein, 1925). He is a guilty joy to watch.
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SCHEMA OF A MYSTERY:
GOSFORD PARK is divided into three acts. Act I gathers around conflictual revelations at The First Night Dinner; the arrivals and orientations before, and the curious night time activities afterward. Act II takes place on the day of The Hunt, where the fall of hapless grouse punctuates the heightening anger and confusion of the men with their host, during manly activities. Back at the Main House, the stresses on the women great and small are evident. Act III involves the climactic Hunt Dinner, where Countess Constance discovers that even she is not proof from Sir William's newly enforced miserliness, and matters come to a head while Ivor Novello sings of a country blessed by God.
The climax is pivotal, I believe, not only for the simple exigencies of the plot, but because so many of servants break discipline, including impeccably faithful Probert, and leave their posts to listen to a new ruler of the Empire, Ivor Novello singing at the piano. That is the harbinger of a revolution in the British workforce. [As the realization of ordinary Americans of the fraudulence of our flagging corporations and banks may be to our society.] They eavesdrop and lean forward at ajar doors, as today their grandchildren might rally for Paul McCartney, Elton Johns or Britney Spears.
There is a denouement, in which formal comic relief is introduced with the entrance of Detective Inspector Thompson (Stephen Fry), who almost regards the murder at Gosford Park as a social opportunity. Contrasted with his toadyism is the thorough, careful work of incredulous Police Constable Dexter (Ron Webster), who respectfully represents a lowly policeman trying desperately to save the evidence in a case. Thus, we are shown, that the British Police had their class divisions, too.
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CONCLUSION:
Whodunit? you ask.
Robert Altman done it.
At 76, Altman is in transition, looking back ever more closely to his career model, Jean Renoir's LaREgle du Jeu (RULES OF THE GAME, 1939), and ahead perhaps, with amused disgust at what Hollywood and his Country have become, to an another period of creativity in Europe. He is at the top of his craft at an age when most directors would be at pasture for ten years.
Altman is back, in entirely foreign territory for him, with the most tightly scripted film he has made in years. Jullian Fellowes' startlingly subtle script reflects the fact that his wife was a Lady in Waiting to Princess Diana, and displays every nuance of a past class system which there, as in America, is now in redux. Altman's son Steve has done him excellent service by creating a supple production design, placing almost every character in the film as a relatively equal participant in the murder puzzle, and within GOSFORD PARK's deeper exploration of decline and revolution. The camera of Andrew Dunn (THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE, 1994) flies upstairs, around corners, and catches out of the side of its eye significant details, perhaps an answer to the mystery of whodunit -- certainly ample evidence as to why.
And Jenny Beavan's costumes, both the stylish and the proper, should win her probably the film's only Oscar.
GOSFORD PARK, in my opinion, is the best film nominated for the Oscar this year, miles ahead of the conventional epics such as LORD OF THE RINGS or slick, meretricious bio-pics like A BEAUTIFUL MIND, films which are usually the real contenders, and no doubt will be again this year.
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REFLECTIONS ON THE AFTERMATH OF AN IMPERIAL MYSTERY:
I never was a guest at a Great British Country Home, but several times, almost at the end of Empire, I was a visitor to the strata not too far below. The authenticity of the inhabitants of Gosford Park feels solid to me.
I remember my Mother telling me what her brother Farqhuar, a top executive at Lever Brothers in Port Sunlight after World War II, said on her last visit: "The next time you come, Katie, an American flag will be flying on top of the Headquarters over there." That, of course, was the import of the collapse of the British Empire.
America took the place of Britain (and France, Holland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Russia, Rome, Macedonea and Egypt) in the World.
I think back, as I often do, to a reconnoiter I made, several months ago of Ian Schraeger's new totalitarian makeover for the once elegant French Room at the Hotel Clift in San Francisco. I sat with casually but expensively dressed people who drank $9 Cosmopolitans and ate $25 hamburgers. I heard, not for the first time, one of them say that he was among "the 20% who do most of the work." (In other words, those who own the businesses, buy the stock or have independent fortunes.)
Some of these new Beautiful People may even fall at the 95th percentile income level of middle age Americans who, according to the February 21, 2002, New York Times, enjoyed over a 176% increase in their retirement savings from 1983 to 1998 while the Median income group lost 18% over the same period. I wonder if some in both groups, like the secretive characters of GOSFORD PARK, ever ponder the bursting of an Economic Bubble [Enron and its scores of associates, dot.coms, etc] during the last couple of years, and the inevitable consequences of "The War on Terrorism"[the madness, useful to some, following 911 and all that]. I wonder if they can see what Sir William McCordle was worried about.
Who said, Only the British and the Europeans had a class system?
In my youth, I was told that what seperated America from the rest of the World was that we had no class system; that we had no Empire -- and wanted none!
They said a lot of funny things like that back then.
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END CREDITS:
(BTW, an Epinionator points out the words Gosford Park are never uttered in the movie. Perhaps that is another of Robert Altman's Red Herrings.)
When the credits rolled at the end of GOSFORD PARK, listing a consultant for The Hunt and one for Place Settings, there was also one for Ivor Novello. Snorts of laughter shot from the audience that I was in. Then, a dozen songs written by Novello scrolled up, and the laughter turned to gasps. Somebody near me said, "Look, that guy in the Tuxedo was real!"
I bet Bob Altman planned that, too!
Sic Transit Gloria!
For Ivor Novello, the McCordles, the "little people" and all of us . . . in time.
GOSFORD PARK.
137 minutes. Rated R.
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