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Film Review by John Demetry
Hearing Ivor sing "The Lovely Land of Might-Have-Been" - a Depression-era pop song about limited standards of living and loving - the servants tiptoe in the manse's corridors to enjoy the music. One of the maids, Mary (Kelly MacDonald), believes the song's dreams are hers to realize. Her attractively mysterious admirer, Robert (Clive Owens), returns to her side after a dubious absence. Mary embraces the hot water bottle he gives her. Desperate intrigues - pregnancy, infidelity, business, murder - unfurl. Guests and servants slip away. Something ominous and awesome is happening, but none of the characters are aware. They play cards. They swoon. It's cruelly funny. Someone sneaks into Sir William's study and stabs him in the heart. An un-sanguine Altman joke: Sir William does not bleed. (He was poisoned before being stabbed.)
Altman's radical approach to filmmaking - in contrast to the mechanisms of the caste system on display or of the genre so totally transcended - develops into Altman's unique method of storytelling. He creates an experience of constant discovery: the actors', the directors', the audiences'. Submitting to his own piqued imagination, Altman exposes truth like light exposing celluloid. Altman gives equal weight to the experiences of the servants, below stairs, and of the masters, above stairs. Unexpected parallels develop. Members of the shooting party duck out to inadequately deal with personal troubles, while the servants hide behind closed doors listening to the music - their own grasp at catharsis. Altman zooms into crowded compositions to isolate an actor's moment or a piquant detail in son Stephen Altman's production design, but there's always a sense of life continuing outside the frame. Altman's overlapping soundtrack amplifies that sense of life, highlighted by the alterations in volume of Ivor's songs. Altman's camera constantly frames the action through reflections, windows, cracked open doors, and around fixtures in the house - it's the eye of a spiritual investigator. Altman expresses the uneasy dance between the public and private personas of the characters. He choreographs the sequence to the melancholy rhythm of complex and conflicting desires touched by the simplicity of the songs' pop dreams. Doing so, Altman connects the ethnic (Black and Jewish, even Catholic), Queer, and lower-class roots of American pop culture with this microcosmic class and sex system of power. Despite its setting, Gosford Park is a profoundly contemporary American artwork, sublimely cosmic - and comic - in scope.
As head housemaid Elsie, Watson pauses her gossiping about the party to ask, "Why do we spend our lives living through them?" Watson's performance defines Altman's spiritual inquiry. Her quirky characterization makes transparent the identity formed by class and pop, revealing a soulful individuality. Altman, surprisingly, finds her reflection in Ryan Phillippe as Hollywood bit player Henry Denton who pretends to be the valet of one of the guests, a director of "Charlie Chan" mystery movies. Elsie dismisses Henry's advances, but Lady Sylvia McCordle does the deed and the director makes a move. "In Hollywood, that's what I'm known for: my discretion," is Henry's mantra. Altman draws upon Phillippe's drive for success and for connection to inspire a performance that penetrates his own omni-sex object persona. Elsie adorns her room with pinups of movie stars, imbuing them with the weight of her fantasy life. As Lady Sylvia, Kristin Scott Thomas, with her platinum blonde hair, gives a pin-up pose, arm stretched high and clicking her nails on a doorway - a banal, bored response to her unhappy marriage. Her home, Gosford Park, is decorated with paintings - art treated only as status symbols. Cinematographer Andrew Dunn lights each shot with painterly precision - and compassion. When Mary questions the head maid (played by Helen Mirren) about her past, Dunn lights Mirren so that dust and strands of misplaced hair reflect light. Mirren is as still - compressed in time - as the subject of a painting as she reveals her primal agony. Dunn illuminates the moral darkness that engulfs these lives. Mirren answers for her past: "I'm the perfect servant. I have no life." The humane distance of Dunn's camera in the following scene - one sister comforting another - honors that betrayed life. When Mary asks Robert if he killed Sir William, she still holds onto pop solutions for comfort. (Wide-eyed Mary seems to have fallen to Earth with the film's opening rain shower.) Robert's answer is definitive: "I don't know. And I don't care." There's too much life in Altman's art to be concerned only with death. |
Ryan Phillippe in Robert Altman's Gosford Park 
Kristin Scott Thomas in Gosford Park
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