Gosford Park

Released 2001
Stars Emily Watson, Derek Jacobi, Maggie Smith, Kristin Scott Thomas, Kelly Macdonald, Clive Owen, Stephen Fry, Ryan Phillippe, Jeremy Northam, Helen Mirren, Michael Gambon, Alan Bates, Richard E. Grant, Eileen Atkins, Bob Balaban, Charles Dance, James Wilby
Directed by Robert Altman

Robert Altman's fun take on classic 1920s English whodunits makes for a jolly good show. This top-notch celebrity clue game features such stars as Kristin Scott Thomas, Michael Gambon, Ryan Phillippe, Maggie Smith and Jeremy Northam, all of whom meet at a verdant country estate for a weekend of fun and games that ends in murder. Think Agatha Christie meets P.G. Wodehouse.

Summary by www.netflix.com

With the opening scenes, I realized this film is one of those ensemble pieces where you don't want to try to keep up with everything that's going on right away. There are too many people with too many cuts to get bogged down in the details early on. The important thing is to catch the tone and rhythms of the interactions, and eventually the relationships will become clear. There's so much overlapping dialogue at various volume levels, that it's difficult to hear everything. I eventually turned subtitles, and it helped tremendously. I strongly recommend this, because the dialogue is quite rich.

The story is a hellaciously interesting and funny essay on the British class system set in the early 1930's. I've never understood why people would accept the position of a life-time servant. These poor people completely forgo their own lives to serve another. It's just inconceivable to me, and we get excellent insights into these lifestyles from both sides. It's fascinating how the servants completely sublimate themselves to their "masters." They go so far as to call each other by their master's name, and they seat themselves at the dinner table according to their master's rank. They live their lives through the people they serve, but the people they serve don't deserve it. The story is wickedly funny in how it explores the dynamics of both halves of the house, and the murder story serves to further illustrate the division between the classes throughout all of British society. Note how the incompetent Inspector Thompson dismisses the servants out of hand. He doesn't even consider they could be involved in the crime, because he doesn't really consider them people. They're just part of the background.

There are too many characters to develop them very much in this story, but the ending is very strong. The entire movie builds the situations and stations for the characters in general, but the ending gives us the personal details we need to connect to the story. At some point everything becomes clear, and I'll bet this is a film that would actually get better the second time you watch it. --Bill Alward, December 28, 2002