Regarded by many as one of the two or three greatest films ever made (it placed second in the 1992 Sight & Sound poll of critics worldwide, third in the 2002 poll), Jean Renoir’s La règle du jeu (Rules of the Game, 1939) is set in a country estate during a festive gathering for a weekend shooting party. The film examines both the posh and the servants attending them, each group in its separate world, although the worlds occasionally cross and even collide. The hunt itself—after the Odessa Steps in Sergei M. Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) the single most celebrated, most startling passage in all of cinema—becomes a metaphor for war as creature after creature is shot down from the sky into a paroxysm of death throes on the ground. It is the methodical nature of the hunt, after such earnest preparations, that shocks as much as the quick, seemingly endless succession of deaths does. Few films shake the soul like this masterpiece.
Robert Altman, one of America’s premier filmmakers, went to England to make a film plainly inspired by the Renoir; he has described Gosford Park as “Rules of the Game meets [Agatha Christie’s] 10 Little Indians.” Like Rules of the Game, Gosford Park is a film about war as well as class differences, a film whose action is occasioned by a shooting party, and also a splendid work of art. At age 76, after years of wonderful filmmaking, Altman has made another wonderful film.
Gosford Park (as Oscar Levant might have said) is as complex as a Bach fugue. At a baronial country mansion in England a large gathering of revelers have elegantly gathered, along with their various servants and attendants. In part, this piece is a murder mystery, a (not too challenging) “whodunit.” Even more intriguingly, it is a film about war: in this case, the psychological aftermath of one world war a year before the rise to power in Germany of Adolf Hitler, which would bring about another world war. Indeed, one can think of the characters in Gosford Park as being trapped between world wars—nearly dormant in the meantime but for their reflexes of class. For the characters are also trapped in their categories of class in a nation that, despite the universally horrific experience of the Great War, has held onto its stratified class system. In this regard, Gosford Park evolves into a companion-piece to Altman’s Twainian Cookie’s Fortune (1999), which examines the baggage of race in America with much the same penetrating zeal with which the baggage of class in Britain is examined here. More generally, Gosford Park is about the grip that in various ways the past maintains on certain people’s lives. Ultimately, the film is about the breadth of human nature that Altman has set out to examine with an eye and ear nearly as probing as what he applied to Nashville (1975) and Short Cuts (1993)—other brilliant examples of his formal signature: a limber zigzagging among a large number of closely related, seemingly unrelated, and coincidentally related characters’ lives.
The owner of the country mansion is Sir William McCordle (Michael Gambon—LBJ, in TV’s The Path to War), a sonuvabitch whose wealth helps maintain the lives of various relatives and hangers-on. (The host in the Renoir, the Marquis Robert de la Cheyniest, also is titled.) A self-made millionaire from the sweatshop factory he owns that may have hit paydirt during the Great War, McCordle came by his title through marriage to Lady Sylvia, who, coolly aristocratic, scarcely seems fazed even when her spouse is found murdered; a resourceful soul (Kristen Scott Thomas, perfect—and perfectly gorgeous), she sidesteps mourning to have sex with Henry Denton, (who she believes is) the young valet of one of her weekend guests. (In his bowler a Magritte image, Ryan Phillippe is good as the scruffy, inquisitive boy, a Hollywood actor incognito on a lark.) Other guests include the couple’s daughter and her poor, mercenary suitor, Lady Sylvia’s two sisters and their spouses, and the mother of the three sisters, the snide, vicious Constance, Countess of Trentham, poor despite her title and financially dependent on her son-in-law. (Hence the marriage in the first place.) Also in attendance is Ivor Novello (Jeremy Northam, marvelous), here, Sir William’s cousin. Novello is, of course, an actual person: the Welsh war hero, matinee idol, and composer whose song “Keep the Home Fires Burning” helped sustain Britain during the First World War. His splendid songs enrich the film.
Novello has brought with him a Hollywood producer, Morris Weissman (Bob Balaban, one of the producers of Gosford Park), who is taking in some British fog for his next Charlie Chan movie. Weissman is condescended to, not only because he is bourgeois—his wife’s father owns a glove factory—and American and unused to British protocol, but also because he is Jewish. The condescension masks hatred, which is palpable beneath the upper-class chill. (He is also, like Novello, a closeted homosexual.) The film’s action in late 1932 barely precedes Hitler’s arrival to the world scene (originally, the idea was to set the action in 1934, but Altman worried that the specter of Hitler would then “color” everything in the film), and one of the great achievements of Gosford Park—no film has done this better—is its detailed identification of European manners with anti-Semitism. Beautifully, Altman simply sets this theme into motion, through the multiplicity of reactions to Weissman with their attendant rationalizations (although there is a passing joke about his name, little is said about Weissman’s being Jewish; the fact that he is Jewish always is the elephant in the room); but so silently does it resonate throughout the film that, at the end, when the countess confides that she hopes that she won’t have to testify at trial regarding her son-in-law’s murder we shiver at her tone and demeanor and at its suggestion of something so seemingly unrelated to her wish to avoid publicly testifying in court: the genteel, “civilized” acquiescence to—more: the unspoken approval of—the Jew-hatred that that unpleasant, rabble-rousing Hitler would continue to stir up. Altman has provided a resonant context in which, by association, we relate Constance’s wish to remain “uninvolved,” albeit in a totally different matter, to the silence that permitted anti-Semitism to flourish. (The double meanings that sustain this theme can astound; for instance, when Constance mentions that she doesn’t know whether Weissman is a producer or a director, or even what the difference is, she of course means but doesn’t state that nothing at all matters about him or about what he does because he is Jewish, the one fact that matters as a basis for dismissing him.) In this thematic context, the hunt for which Sir William’s guests have gathered becomes an image of the Holocaust.
If the film had done no more than pursue this theme it might have managed, given its incisiveness and power on that score, to become one of Altman’s highest cinematic attainments. But there is more to Gosford Park besides. Novello, a celebrity to the servants in their downstairs domain, provides a bridge between upstairs and downstairs. In one of the film’s most moving moments, the servants collect on a stairwell to listen to Novello upstairs entertaining his fellow guests by playing the piano and singing his songs. Altman has devised a piercing way to use sound here, for what the servants hear sounds like echoes of music rather than the actual music: the aural equivalent of table scraps. Indeed, Altman elsewhere compares the servants’ dinner with the feast being enjoyed upstairs, and Denton, once he is exposed as an actor playing a valet rather than really a valet, is able to remark sharply to Lady Sylvia that the beds upstairs are much more comfortable than the ones in servant quarters. Unifying all this is the source of Sir William’s wealth, for his money came to him from the hard labor of barely subsistent wage-earners.
Ironically, then, Sir William himself is another bridge between upstairs and downstairs. Moreover, just as sex mixes races in Cookie’s Fortune, sex mixes classes here. Years ago, McCordle bedded some of the women who worked in his factory, including two sisters who now work in his mansion, Mrs. Wilson, the housekeeper, and Mrs. Croft, the cook. The bastard impregnated them both. Croft’s baby died; McCordle took Wilson’s son away from her, under the pretext of finding him an adoptive home, but handed over the infant to an orphanage. These past acts will come home to bite McCordle—to kill him, as it were, twice, when one downstairs soul kills him with poison and another, believing him alive, stabs him. But Thompson, the incompetent police detective investigating the case (Stephen Fry, riotously funny), won’t find out any of this. He claims always to solve his cases; if we believe this (which we don’t), this will be the first time the solution eludes him, owing to this thinking of his in class boxes. This working-class inspector announces that he will probe upstairs only, that is to say, only those who had something to do with Sir William, as though no one downstairs conceivably might have had something to do with him. Indeed! Our detective, it would appear, so heavily buys into England’s class structure that he acquiesces his judgment so that he may submit to the authority of his “betters.” In short, he is ultimately not in charge of his investigation; those he is investigating are.
The one character who (unofficially) does solve the crime is Constance’s personal maid, Mary (Kelly Macdonald, bright and sensitive). Some viewers of the film, I understand, profess to being short of Mary’s distance in this regard, a revelation of almost inconceivably careless viewing since the crime is shown being committed, with the criminal in plain and full sight, and later Mary asks her, “Why did you do it?” and she, Sir William’s killer, proceeds to explain. (Perhaps this will help: Wilson did it.) I cannot begin to understand, therefore, anyone’s leaving the show without knowing who committed the murder (Gosford Park’s “Rosebud,” as it were)—except for this: Altman emphasizes nothing in this film, not even this disclosure. He evokes an environment, a world of cocooned leisure poised to dissolve under the weight of war, and this subsumes everything into the film’s patient rhythm and steady flow of images and sounds. Formally, Gosford Park is perfectly realized, with exquisite use made of long shots—Andrew Dunn’s color lensing helps Altman to achieve the sense of a fragile stillness—and slight, forlorn camera movements that cumulatively suggest a world passing and being lost, unnoticed, to time. The film unfolds with such assurance—although often imperceptibly, the camera is constantly in motion—that its tour-de-force, the murder of Sir William, becomes part of a taut, deft mosaic zigzagging amongst downstairs, the party upstairs, and poor Sir William, retired to his study.
The various servants yield some wonderful performances, especially by Emily Watson as Elsie, the housemaid whom Sir William was currently bedding, Richard E. Grant as one of the footmen, and Alan Bates as Jennings, who runs the staff. This is a great role for Bates, for Jennings’s coldness and superciliousness ironically have assimilated, and project, upper-class arrogance: in the downstairs world, an illusive reflection of upstairs authority. Jennings’s “power” over the other servants, however, can as little ease his anguish over his past as can his alcoholism: a conscientious objector during the world war, he did time in prison afterwards as a result. But the finest performance in the film—it’s one of the most extraordinary performances I have seen—comes from Helen Mirren, the great British actress best known to American audiences for her Emmy-winning portrayal of Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect. Wilson, like Jennings, is in unsuccessful flight from an embittering past; she is the “perfect servant,” she says, because she has no life of her own. Her “life” belongs to those she serves, an unwitting reference—Altman’s reference for us—to the child she gave up, in effect, the life she relinquished and lost. Wilson’s absolute efficiency buries beneath it intolerable anguish, pain and regret, and her ultimate if fleeting breakdown is urgent, moving and immense. Mirren was named best supporting actress by the London film critics and, in the U.S., by both the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics. The Screen Actors Guild also found her best in this category.
Julian Fellowes’ excellent script won numerous prizes, including the Oscar, and Altman was named best director by the New York Film Critics Circle, the National Society of Film Critics, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the American Film Institute, and the Italian film critics. Both the British film academy and the London film critics named Gosford Park the year’s best film.
Altman has struck here profound emotional chords, and never has he made a more richly entertaining film.
