Gosford Park (From The Argus)

Gosford Park

5:20pm Friday 23rd October 2009 in

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Like you, we get our film fix from a variety of sources – not just the latest multiplex releases. Old, new, borrowed or Blu-Ray, Random Views is a sample of what we’ve been watching. Liz Johnson reviews 2001’s Gosford Park… The American director Robert Altman is renowned for directing lavish ensemble pieces, where starry casts throng together, form cliques, mutter in corners, talk across each other and walk on and off camera, in a verisimilitude that looks and sounds like life. His masterpieces are generally thought to be Nashville (1975) and The Player (1992). In my opinion, he scored a hat trick with Gosford Park (2001). Maybe it takes an outsider to fix a society with such a cold, forensic eye. Altman skewers the British class system in its death throes in that year of disgrace, 1932. While Hitler grasps the ladder of power in Germany, Sir William and Lady Sylvia McCordle, he a maid-menacing old boor and she a glacial vamp, inhabit a fairytale country pile run by the fleet of servants who live below stairs – the engine room of the huge house. The cast of masters and servants is staggeringly good, led by Kristin Scott Thomas as Lady Sylvia and Michael Gambon as Sir Willam. The stars converge on Gosford Park for a weekend of huntin’ and shootin’ – relatives, hangers-on, cads and rotters, plus a visiting Yankee film director (Bob Balaban, who co-conceived the film with Altman and gives us the outsider’s angle on this extraordinary world). Merchant Ivory regular James Wilby plays Freddie Nesbitt, a bounder who’s married beneath himself and now regrets it. Charles Dance is Lord Stockbridge, the regally indifferent husband of Sylvia’s sister Louisa. Lieutenant Meredith (Tom Hollander) has come to clinch a vital but doomed business deal with Sir William. Maggie Smith is magnificently horrible as Sylvia’s aunt Lady Constance. Here she is, insulting visiting stage star Ivor Novello (a suave, ironic Jeremy Northam) about his latest show: ‘It must be so disappointing when it just flops like that.’ The servants stir a seething broth of their own – half fascinated by ‘them upstairs,’ half-contemptuous. Scenes of languor in the toffs’ drawing room are contrasted with violent scenes of sweaty activity below stairs, as the visiting guests’ maids and valets mix with the resident staff. Helen Mirren, unrecognisably dowdy and subdued, plays head housekeeper Mrs Wilson, an iceberg with a painful, suppressed link to Sir William. Alan Bates is head butler Mr Jennings, poker-faced and deferential, who hits the bottle rather too hard to ease the pain of a secret war wound. Visiting maid Mary (Kelly Macdonald), artlessly asking questions and making friends, clues us in on both the aristocratic family and the complex web of relationships below stairs. And it’s she who unravels the puzzle at the heart of the film, which concerns Sir William, Mrs Wilson and the visiting valet Mr Parks (a dignified Clive Owen). The tired old format of country house comedy crossed with Miss Marple murder mystery could have failed dismally, but Altman continually pricks us with sharp shards of truth. In the opening sequence, shot in a downpour of rain, maids and butlers hold umbrellas over the heads of their betters while they themselves get steadily soaked. Mary the maid spends her evening washing out Lady Constance’s blouse for the morrow, only to be told, carelessly, the next morning that it isn’t needed after all. Ladies hold their wrists out to their servants to be denuded of jewels, like bored children, while skivvies creep into bedrooms at dawn to light noiseless fires for their masters. Sexy housemaid Elsie (Emily Watson), whose apron Sir William is keen to brush the crumbs off, says of the aristocrats: ‘None of ’em could earn enough to buy a packet of fags off their own bat.’ Elsie is the one who crashes through the fabric of the class charade, midway through the film, when she blurts out a sentence that throws a blinding light on the real state of play in this house of mirrors. Needless to say, once the truth has been voiced, she has to go. The heartless English aristo is an easy target, but there are moments when the two tribes meet as human beings. Lieutenant Meredith goes below stairs to sample some homemade jam, trying to soothe his rage at the news that his business venture with Sir William has gone belly-up, and chats to head housemaid Dorothy, who’s secretly in love with butler Mr Jennings. He asks Dorothy, with gross insensitivity given their relative positions in the world, why she thinks certain men prosper while others have no luck at all. Dorothy, who lives as a lackey of the ruling class, gives him a reply that proves she's still a free spirit. ‘I believe in love. If you love someone and you are loved in return, that’s all that matters.’ She speaks as an equal, but only for a moment. Sir William’s murder, by not one but two assailants, is almost an interruption in the scathing social comedy, while Stephen Fry’s turn as a laughably inept police detective seems intrusive, as if he’s wandered in off an Agatha Christie film set. But the rich, sad brew continues to bubble until the unveiling of the unlikely killer(s), and by the close of the film I guarantee you’ll be a passionate partisan of the servant underclass, ready to man the barricades in the cause of social revolution.