At 137 minutes, with a 1930s country-estate setting, and featuring a huge, starry British cast, Robert Altman’s Gosford Park is one of the heftiest treats under the tree — and the one with the most elegant wrapping. It’s a true gift, too, especially for acting freaks. Altman’s famous naturalist techniques for working with actors — setting up multiple cameras, miking everyone in the cast, encouraging improvisation and holding off decisions about where the focus should go in a scene until he gets into the editing room — has always seemed quintessentially American, a response to the Method training of his performers. The surprise is how felicitous the results are when he tries the same approach with a cast of classically trained English actors. (The only Americans in the cast are Bob Balaban and Ryan Phillippe.) Altman has said that the cast of Gosford Park behaved with utterly unselfconscious professionalism, quietly developing their individual characters without fussing over one another or over the shape of the film. Their blissful self-sufficiency produces the kind of ensemble work that you dream about.

The screenplay by Julian Fellowes is a hybrid: a comedy of manners (with attendant melodramatic episodes) set at the intersection of the aristocracy and the servant class crossed with an Agatha Christie–style murder mystery wherein, during a weekend in the country, the boorish, insensitive host (Michael Gambon) is dispatched in his study. The notion of mixing the two is sound: many genteel English thrillers borrow the milieu and mood of high comedy. The limitations lie in the handling of the two elements. The scenes involving Stephen Fry as the blockheaded detective called in to solve the murder are rendered in a parodic style at odds with the tone and style of the rest of the movie. And Fellowes is so determined to make a familiar class statement that in the final analysis the material seems thin. These two shortcomings are sharply in evidence when Fry’s Inspector Thompson declines to interview the servants because they’re beneath his notice. What Scotland Yard man with years of training would fail to appreciate the depth of observation to be found in the kitchens of an upper-class home?

Fortunately, the filmmaking is so marvelously fluid and the performances are so exquisitely detailed that these conceptual problems don’t get in the way of one’s enjoyment. It’s difficult to single out actors. The showiest and funniest performances come from Gambon and Maggie Smith as his aging sister, who has a delightful streak of acid in her blue blood. Many of the jewels of the current English theater are cast as servants: Alan Bates, Derek Jacobi, Helen Mirren, Eileen Atkins, Richard E. Grant, Clive Owen. They’re all splendid (and Grant is hilarious); Mirren (as the housekeeper, Mrs. Wilson), Atkins (as the cook, Mrs. Croft), and Owen, the star of Croupier, captured here in a more melancholy mood, are memorable. I’ve usually found Atkins mannered and unyielding, but this year, here and in her small role in Mike Nichols’s HBO transcription of Wit, she’s won me over. And as is so often the case, Mirren is simply amazing.

Kelly Macdonald is particularly expressive as the Scots servant girl Mary; the character is a device that Macdonald effortlessly rises above. Emily Watson is at her most keen-witted as Mary’s insouciant roommate, Elsie, who dares to fall in love with her aristocratic lover. Sophie Thompson, an actress with an extraordinarily delicate style on both stage and screen, is touching as Dorothy, whose unrequited devotion to Alan Bates’s head servant Jennings amounts to a sort of clandestine desperation. Kristin Scott Thomas tosses off the requisite bitch-wife part with panache, especially in her scenes with Ryan Phillippe, who gives half of a delicious comic turn as the servant who comes attached to Balaban’s Hollywood producer. (When he unmasks halfway through the film, his performance loses its sense of purpose.)

And Jeremy Northam, playing the movie’s sole true-life personality, the actor/songwriter Ivor Novello, is not only charming but — given his bystander’s role — almost mysteriously fleshed-out. He doesn’t have a single important scene, but he’s so convincing that he seems to follow you home afterward. Perhaps that’s partly because his character, who’s neither lord nor servant, isn’t implicated in the class scheme of Fellowes’s screenplay; he simply exists. And among this phenomenally distinguished crew, he’s my personal favorite.

Issue Date: January 3 - 10, 2002

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