CLASS ACTION : Altman's 'Gosford Park'. - movie review

Robert Altman seems an unlikely director for Gosford Park. How could the sensibility behind a film as sprawling and wild as Nashville possibly cram itself into the small-genre box of a period-piece murder mystery set on an English country manor in 1932? Isn't that too tame, too mannered, too British? The whole thing seems way wrong, until you see the movie, which is way right.

Altman is arguably the American director of our time. With their ensemble dramas, interconnecting plots, and trademark overlapping dialogue, his best movies--M*A*S*H*, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Short Cuts, The Player, Nashville--present a brand of cinematic art keyed perfectly to the raucous free-for-all of American society, to what poet Delmore Schwartz once called "the scrimmage of appetite all around." No one else gets the allure, the excess, the danger, and the energy of this country like Altman; no one loves us and loathes us as well. With his signature mix of the hilarious and the ferocious, the seventy-six-year-old director has kept a steady bead on the wildly moving target of American life.

Life at Gosford Park, on the other hand, seems at first glance hardly to move at all. The setup is pure Agatha Christie, which is to say, Jane Austen plus a murder. A dozen guests gather at the country home of Sir William McCordle (Michael Gambon) for a weekend of dining, cigars, entertainments, and a pheasant shoot. The film is mostly talk; eavesdropping, we learn who is beholden to whom, who covets what, who has a secret assignation where. There are motives aplenty for murder. There are bottles of poison in the kitchen. There's even a butler, Jennings (Alan Bates)--though it seems unlikely that he did it.

Where the violence of American society sits right on the surface, in 1930s England it's all buried, embedded deep in the tissue of class, and you can feel Altman's glee in wielding the knife. Power in America is a grab; at Gosford Park, it's a given. Those who have it, use it, with condescension and casual disdain for those on the receiving end. Class means knowing--and accepting--your place, even if your place is standing in a downpour outside a parked car, like the servant Mary (Kelly Macdonald), helping milady (Maggie Smith), sitting snug and dry inside, open a martini shaker. Class means knowing who's invisible. When the lone outsider at the party, an American movie producer (Bob Balaban) introduces himself to Lord Stockbridge (Charles Dance) with a nasal "Hello, I'm Morris Weissman," the debonair lord, majestically baffled, answers, "Who?" How could he possibly be engaged in conversation with someone named Morris Weissman? It's as if a fly has spoken.

Most invisible of all are the servants. The credits at film's end divides the cast into "Above the Stairs" and "Below the Stairs," and Gosford Park's main business is exploring the insults and intrigues of class. Altman and his screenwriter, Julian Fellowes, portray the insolent freeness with which the bluebloods talk in front of the servants, and the arrogant arbitrariness of power, as when Smith's Countess Trentham commands Mary to wash a shirt for her in the middle of the night--then decides, come next morning, not to wear it after all. A servant's life consists of a thousand such cuts. Yet what bubbles away below the stairs is hardly revolution. The head housekeeper, Mrs. Wilson (Helen Mirren), briskly summons other servants by their masters' names, and seats them at the kitchen dinner table according to their masters' eminence. The head butler, Jennings, fidgets uncomfortably when Weissman calls him "Mr. Jennings." American-style egalitarianism can only spoil the party at Gosford Park; it throws sand in the gears of the social machine.

And the upstairs-downstairs relation proves far more flexible and complex than it seems. The lords and ladies provide an ongoing soap opera for the servants, who are alternately peeved and awed; there's a great scene in which the entire staff stands outside the drawing room door, swooning, while one handsome houseguest, the noted actor Ivor Novello (Jeremy Northam), sings at the piano. And the aristocrats in turn continually press their servants for the latest gossip below. Altman anatomizes hierarchical social relations, where seemingly rigid boundaries sponsor a permanent culture of transgression, small and large--from Jennings surreptitiously licking his finger after pouring Bloody Marys, to Lady Sylvia (Kristin Scott Thomas) indulging a coldly businesslike tryst with a handsome young servant. Sexual liaisons across class lines are a fact of life, especially with the notoriously lecherous Sir William around. The only sin is indiscretion. Or--worse--love.

Eventually, when a murder occurs, it's almost as an afterthought. Gosford Park isn't really a whodunit, but a study in manners and morals. The real violence inheres in the very structure of society, and in personalities--the murderousness of sharks like the Countess of Trentham, whose every utterance is at some deep level an assault. ("Difficult color, that green," she says, eyeing another woman's dress. "Very tricky.") The murder itself, which appropriately combines poisoning and stabbing, is merely an expression of the prevailing social Darwinism. These people have motives, but don't really need them; they are their own motives.