Gosford Park
Toffee-Nosed Cakesniffers and Horrible Old Bats
Gosford Park features Maggie Smith as the Countess of Trentham, and seldom, if ever, has one character so completely encapsulated a movie. Smith’s character is a horrible old bat. She is selfish and demanding and hateful. She is consistently annoying and intentionally rude. She is obsessed with what people wear and table settings and marmalade and gossip. She is mean-spirited and vicious, in a polite sort of way. Worst of all, she is a tiresome old bore.
Robert Altman - who is getting to be a horrible old bat himself - is the director of Gosford Park, and he has created a long, pointless, pretentious meandering tale about a 1932 hunting party in the British countryside that culminates in the murder of an obnoxious aristocrat. Gosford Park is filled to the rafters with loathsome highbinders, insufferable butlers, toffee-nosed sycophants, abhorrent poseurs, and downtrodden servants. It is riddled with class and status and rank, preoccupied with wealth and titles and fame. It has a sharp eye for jewelry and costumes and period cars and the way that people can use class distinctions to belittle others.
The world of Gosford Park - with its ornate table settings, its small army of household staff, its Edwardian splendor and Victorian snootiness - is designed to evoke one reaction in an American middle-class audience, and that reaction is resentment. It’s present in the very first scenes of the movie, which features poor Scottish lady’s maid Kelly Macdonald standing out in the freezing rain in order to help Maggie Smith open a Thermos of coffee. How inconsiderate, we think. Later, we meet Claudie Blakely as the middle-class wife driven to tears by the catty comments of the other guests. How thoughtless, we think. But that’s the least of it. The whole movie is based on arrogant la-de-dah blue-bloods treating their servants like dogs, and the head servants passing on their poor treatment to the kitchen staff and lady’s maids. Gosford Park is a cavalcade of resentments, large and small, spaced out over 137 endless, everlasting minutes. There’s nothing inherently wrong with exploring the themes of resentment and class antipathy and snobbishness, but the constant harping on these themes makes Gosford Park an unpleasant, tiresome, wearying ordeal.
Having said that, it’s impossible to entirely hate and despise Gosford Park. Despite being overlong, poorly paced, and essentially pointless, and cursed with weak characterization and an incomprehensibly large cast, Gosford Park is not completely horrible and wretched throughout. That it is not is testament not to any residual skill Altman may have left but to the overall excellence and talent of its large and sprawling ensemble of skilled British actors.
There are great performances here both from the haughty “upstairs” aristocrats and the humble “downstairs” servants. Maggie Smith has the showiest part amongst the blue-blood set, and does an admirable job; she almost redefines what it is to be a horrible old bat. Kristen Scott Thomas looks smashing draped all over a succession of sofas, although she’s not given nearly enough of an opportunity to be nasty. Camilla Rutherford makes the most of her underwritten role as a dewy-eyed innocent. Jeremy Northam is appropriately dishy as the heartthrob movie star. Bob Balaban does a brave job as the token American, but he’s almost forgotten halfway through the movie.
Most of the real talent is “downstairs” though, and there’s enough good acting that one almost doesn’t notice Derek Jacobi, which tells you something. Emily Watson steals the movie as the saucy housemaid; she’s the one character in the movie that you’d like to spend more time with. Helen Mirren and Eileen Atkins are marvelous as the feuding housekeepers. Alan Bates is priceless as the stiff-upper-lip butler. Stephen Fry, as the clueless police inspector, brings the closest thing to comedy in the whole dreary mess. (Fry does a very good job, but his character is so close to his part in the fourth Blackadder series that one wonders why Altman just didn’t bring in Rowan Atkinson and Miranda Richardson and have done with it.)
Gosford Park is almost worth seeing for its performances but not quite. There is some good acting work here, but overall it is wasted by the pointless, humorless, endless aspects of the movie. Altman does an excellent job of capturing the unpleasant atmosphere of being trapped in a rambling English country mansion with a collection of unspeakable cakesniffers. Why anyone in his right mind would want to relive that experience, though, is another question.