Review of Gosford Park (2001) by Edith N — 18 Jan 2009

There are more layers of plot to this movie than I can reliably keep straight in my head. Altman was generally more interested in characters than plot anyway, meaning that if you don't get into the characters, you can't really get into the film. To be sure, I have a hard time remembering characters' names in this, which makes the movie even harder to follow, but so many of them are playing archetypes that it doesn't really matter. If you can keep three or four of the upstairs types separate and perhaps a half-dozen of the downstairs ones, you've got this figured out well enough. I'm not sure about all the familiar relationships, but in the long run, only about three of them are really important to the murder story--and we only find out one chain of family at the very end.

There is a shooting party at Gosford Park. (Not that the estate name is ever mentioned in the movie.) William McCordle (Michael Gambon) and his wife, Isobel (Kristin Scott Thomas) have invited most of their family, and somehow, an American moviemaker, Morris Weissman (Bob Balaban), is part of it. From the beginning, we are most interested in Constance Trentham (Dame Maggie Smith) and her servant, Mary Maceachran (Kelly McDonald). Constance is a shrewish old biddy with a penchant for gossip. She instructs Mary to acquire as much of it as possible from belowstairs, but she is also firm that Mary should not give any away. During this weekend of infighting and power plays, William McCordle is stabbed in the back. Literally. Inspector Thompson (Stephen Fry), cheerful but incompetent, is brought in and doesn't do very much.

I think the only British country murder story I've read is Dorothy L. Sayers's [i]Clouds of Witness[/i], wherein Lady Mary Wimsey's fiance, Captain Denis Cathcart, is found dead in the garden. I believe Agatha Christie did quite a few, but I've never really read Christie. My understanding, however, is that Altman differs from those fine British ladies on several important points, even leaving aside such piddling things as nation of origin and Y chromosome. Easily the two most important are the bumbling nature of his detective and the focus on the servants, often over their masters. Dear Lord Peter may have seemed incompetent, but you know that, once he was on a case, it was by-Gods going to be solved. What's more, aside from a brief interview, the servants hardly matter. Certainly it was unthinkable that one of them would have actually committed the murder, the cliche about the butler having done it aside. I don't think Peter even bothered questioning the butler.

In this, the brightest character, the one who pieces everything together, is Mary Maceachran. Of course, she is best placed to do so. To me, one of the best sequences of the movie is when Ivor Novello (here played by Jeremy Northam, and more on whom anon) is playing and singing for the guests. They are dreadfully bored, most of them, to the point of active rudeness on the part of Constance Trentham. The servants, however, are in the dark of the back halls, listening and watching. Two of them are even dancing. Of course, if the upstairs people wanted to hear Ivor Novello perform, they could have just gone to see him on the West End. People of Mary's rank could not have hoped for a private performance by one of the great stars of British theatre in their own home; those who can don't really want it. This, almost as much as the scenes wherein Mary pieces together the sequence of events that night, show the difference between the classes.

So about Ivor Novello. He, unlike anyone else in the movie, was real. There's even a disclaimer in the credits that this never happened to him. As it happened, I'd never heard of him before. The first time I saw this movie, years ago, I thought he was some Cole Porter type, not a real person but an imitation of one. It turns out I was wrong. It's true that Ivor Novello kind of [i]was[/i] a Cole Porter type, both in public and in private, but he actually was a living, breathing person in his own right and probably just as famous as Porter. Though not anymore, probably because he was still writing operettas after they'd stopped being the thing. However, he was a Cole Porter type who was in Hitchcock movies, which Cole Porter could not have said. Oh, and those songs the character sings in the movie? Yeah, they're pretty much all really Ivor Novello songs.