Park Life

Who would have guessed that 31 years after M*A*S*H, the film that made Robert Altman's reputation, he still would be turning out movies as good as his latest release, Gosford Park? Full of the director's usual energy, powered by the sense of controlled chaos that marks all of his ensemble films, Gosford Park also finds the quintessentially American director completely at home in the alien milieu of England in 1932. Ironically, his last sally into a European setting, 1994's fashion-world satire Prêt-à-Porter, was one of the low points of his filmography.

In form, Gosford Park lies in the tradition of innumerable old movies (including many adapted from Agatha Christie) in which a group of people, all with their own agendas, is thrown together in an isolated country house; a murder occurs, and a savvy detective must figure out who, out of the several guests with strong motives, actually committed the crime. As usual, Altman is less concerned with crafting a perfect example of the genre as he is with examining the genre itself. Neil Simon already did the ultimate parody of this stuff in the 1976 Murder by Death (in which Maggie Smith, one of the stars of Gosford Park, also appears); Altman's approach is not so much a satire as a reimagining of the genre's conventions, with the class elements emphasized.

Like M*A*S*H, Nashville, Short Cuts and numerous other Altman projects, Gosford Park drops the viewer into a complex, frantic situation with no clear-cut protagonist to cling to. The closest the film comes to a central character is Mary Maceachran (Kelly Macdonald), a demure young maid accompanying her aged employer, the snobbish Lady Trentham (Smith), for a weekend party at the summer house of crusty Sir William McCordle (Michael Gambon), whose coldhearted wife, Sylvia (Kristin Scott Thomas), is Lady Trentham's niece.

Also in attendance are Sylvia's two sisters (Geraldine Somerville and Natasha Wightman) and their husbands (Charles Dance and Tom Hollander). In addition, there is the McCordle daughter (Camilla Rutherford); Ivor Novello (Jeremy Northam), the real-life British songwriter and matinee idol whose persona Altman and screenwriter Julian Fellowes have borrowed for the film; and his guest, a Hollywood producer (Bob Balaban, who also actually co-produced Gosford Park) doing background research for the upcoming Charlie Chan in London.

If this seems intimidatingly complicated, be assured that you haven't heard the half of it. There are four more guests, whose relationship to the others continues to baffle me (after two viewings of the movie). Indeed, two of them seem so tangential to everything in the film that one can only wonder if they are remnants of a subplot that was excised in the final cut. And we haven't even gotten to the servants yet, who are the real heart of the story.

What the servants in this world lack in money and power, they compensate for with ritual and knowledge. That is, while they know everything that's going on in both their realm and the "upstairs" world of their wealthy and/or titled employers, the latter know very little about what goes on "downstairs." Altman is careful to show us how the downstairs people are omnipresent, even as they strive to self-effacingly blend in with the woodwork. On one hand, it is their pleasure and validation to serve; on the other, they are completely aware of their bosses' utter helplessness without them.

Mary, new to service, functions much of the time as our surrogate, as the house staff--butler (Alan Bates), housekeeper (Helen Mirren), cook (Eileen Atkins, co-creator of Upstairs Downstairs, to which the film clearly owes a debt), footmen (Richard E. Grant and Jeremy Swift) and head housemaid (Emily Watson)--explain to her the insane rules mandated by tradition. They inform her that visiting servants will be addressed only by the names of their employers, effectively stripping them of any other identity; likewise, each will have his or her seat at dinner determined by the employer's rank.

This may sound like P.G. Wodehouse-land: Jeeves, who took the notion of valet's duty into the realm of genius, would have been at home here. But, aside from Jeeves, Wodehouse was less concerned with the community of servants; nor would he have ever ventured anywhere near Gosford Park's concern with sexual matters, particularly the "class miscegenation" between the upstairs and downstairs folk.

If there is a problem with Gosford Park, it's that Altman seems so enthralled with the interplay of the characters that he's reluctant to put much energy into the mystery itself. The murder doesn't occur until somewhere past the midway point. And the "brilliant" inspector (Stephen Fry) is so totally imbecilic, so broadly portrayed, he seems to have wandered in from a different film altogether, quite possibly Murder by Death. Still, there is a payoff on the murder, one inextricably integrated with all the class interactions the movie has set up so carefully.