At the beginning of Robert Altman's brilliant comedy "Gosford Park," two Rolls-Royces, both heading for a weekend shooting party in the country, stop on a narrow road. The weather is vile in the usual English way—cold, gray, and wet—and the first car stops because its owner, Constance, Countess of Trentham (Maggie Smith), would like to warm herself but cannot open her thermos. Her new maid, Mary (Kelly Macdonald), is forced to come around from the front seat to open it for her. The second car, pulling up alongside, is driven by one Morris Weissman (Bob Balaban), of Hollywood, a producer of Charlie Chan movies. Next to him sits the handsome Ivor Novello (Jeremy Northam), a real-life British matinée idol, and in the back seat is Weissman's young valet (Ryan Phillippe), who stares insolently at Lady Trentham.
"Are you O.K.?" Weissman asks.
"Am I what?" she replies.
By affecting not to understand a common American locution, Constance fully intends to slight a Jew from the movie business. Later, seated in the drawing room at Gosford Park—an enormous estate owned by her niece's husband, Sir William McCordle (Michael Gambon)—Constance interrogates Novello about his latest movie, "The Lodger," which, she can't help pointing out, has not done very well at the box office. For her, the movies, like American slang, are something to be deplored, dismissed, even undermined. The year is 1932, and Constance, barely hanging on to her feudal prerogatives, knows very well that the art of the masses can have nothing but a levelling effect on English manners. Like the other members of the weekend mob at Gosford Park, Constance depends heavily on the largesse of Sir William, a school teacher's son who made his pile as a factory owner and bought his way into the aristocracy. Sir William is a rapacious old dog who has victimized some of the guests and some of the household staff, too. His wife, Lady Sylvia (Kristin Scott Thomas), detests him, and amuses herself with the better-looking male servants. She has quite a number to choose from: for the weekend party, there are, by my count, twenty-nine servants in attendance on fourteen people—and I'm not including the beaters, who chase pheasants through the brush.
Many of the guests arrive with their own help. How to keep the names straight? As Mrs. Wilson (Helen Mirren), the chief housekeeper, explains, the visiting servants, for simplicity's sake, will be known "belowstairs" by the names of their employers. For instance, Parks (Clive Owen), the handsome and self-possessed valet of Lord Stockbridge (Charles Dance), is known as Mr. Stockbridge. At dinner, the servants are arrayed according to their status. With a start, we realize that they have established their own class system, imitating the ranks and privileges—and humiliations—of their employers. The butler (Alan Bates) bullies the first footman (Richard E. Grant), who bullies the second footman (Jeremy Swift), and so on. In the course of the weekend, however, some of the servants assert who they are and what they want. A murder is committed, an act of personal vengeance that vibrates with decades-old class and sexual antagonisms.
Not only are the Americans and the movies taking over but Hitler is coming, and, after the war, a Labour government, all of which will curtail the elaborate life of the great country estates. Yet "Gosford Park" is neither an elegy nor a Marxist attack. It's too bitter to be the first, too witty to be the second. The movie is a very high-style and amusing genre entertainment that, at the same time, has its roots planted deep in social reality. Call it an Agatha Christie house-party picture that reveals the intricacies of class and sex in a way that Christie never could. "Gosford Park" is based on an idea of Altman and Bob Balaban's and was written by the English actor and screenwriter Julian Fellowes, who is clearly a very talented man. The filmmakers begin by nesting comfortably in the most familiar of conventions. There's the large group of swells and underlings. There are motives and clues (knife, poison, shattered cup), a tomblike library, footsteps in the night—the entire creaking paraphernalia of the English murder mystery. Only this time nothing creaks. Instead, the movie flows with an almost erotic intensity from room to room, from upstairs to downstairs, from master to servant, from tender intimacy to public humiliation. All this traffic is selected and combined by the greatest flow-master in movie history.
In such films as "A Wedding," "Health," and "Short Cuts," Altman, operating in the American social vacuum, tried to pull the entire atmosphere and action out of his own perceptions. Those movies reflected the acid temperament of a cynic who saw through everybody and everything. At times, Altman didn't so much reveal his characters as expose them, and one could hardly enjoy the virtuosic way he combined and overlapped the movements of people who were already cut off at the knees. But in "Gosford Park" no one is cut off; all the characters, however briefly they appear, are fully limbed with histories, desires, habits, quirks. Working within the double frame of English manners and Agatha Christie, Altman holds his nastiness in check, and he pulls off something marvellous, just as he did in "M*A*S*H," "McCabe & Mrs. Miller," "Nashville," and "The Player": he achieves his dream of a truly organic form, in which everyone is connected to everyone else, and life circulates around a central group of ideas and emotions in bristling orbits. Altman shot much of the movie with two cameras going at once (Andrew Dunn is the cinematographer). In some scenes, he sticks to a fixed position, and two or three people talk, nattering away in a bedroom or in the pantry (the plot is borne aloft on a cloud of servants' gossip); in others, pairs of people separate from the crowd and migrate around a room as a moving camera picks up pieces of their snits, complaints, and jealousies. We may not understand all the allusions at once, but we hear fragments that we join with other fragments, and eventually the entire picture quite dazzlingly comes together: we see the power of money and the varieties of predatory behavior, the loyalties and betrayals. For all its bitchy veneer and murder-mystery structure, "Gosford Park" offers as full a view of a complex social milieu as we are likely to get in the movies.
The English actors that Altman has gathered seem utterly at ease playing monstrous or abject people. Perhaps that's because the English character is generally more pronounced than the American—theatricalism is inherent in English social life. For Americans, the upper-class combination of formality and brazen rudeness is genuinely shocking and perhaps unforgivable. But Altman and Balaban's view of the matter is ironic. In "Gosford Park," the Americans come off as friendly and democratic but insensible; they don't catch the tone of class distinctions. When they try to pretend that such things don't exist, they insult the upper and the lower orders. The movie slyly suggests that their coming rule will bring dullness to the world.
I don't know when there have been so many memorable performances in a single film. Charles Dance, as a withdrawn, half-deaf war hero, moldering in boredom, creates a character virtually without speaking; he merely leans irritably in the direction of whatever demand is made on him. Emily Watson, as the rebellious maid Elsie, who is having an affair with Sir William, lets the unruly life in her character burst right through a meek surface. She's the soul of the movie, but everyone is terrific, even the blond heartthrob Ryan Phillippe, whom Altman turns into a cherub-faced sex toy that anyone can play with. Much of the movie is ripely funny, and the murder itself plays as farce: the grateful widow happily assembles the guests for questioning; the detective is a bumbling fool. But, even when Altman jokes, he is working at deeper levels. When Jeremy Northam's Ivor Novello, sitting at the piano, entertains the guests with charming romantic songs, his voice drifts up into the house, and servants gather raptly on the stairs, and at the windows, as if basking in sunshine on a winter day. "Gosford Park" suggests that popular entertainment will eventually help liberate the lower classes. In the meantime, the old humiliations and sorrows grind away. The movie arrives at its climax with an astonishing burst of emotion, followed by reconciliation and peace. "Gosford Park" may chronicle a debonair weekend in the country, but, in the end, it offers something like catharsis.