Gosford Park

The movie Gosford Park takes place during a weekend
shooting party on an English country estate during the 1930s. The
house belongs to Sir William McCordle, who is very wealthy. He owns
several sweatshops, and he supports almost all the members of his
wife’s family. Even with all this, however, he has no control over
who he sits next to at dinner in his own home.

He always has to sit next to his wife’s aunt
Constance, the Countess of Trentham, although he dislikes her, and he
never gets to sit next to his sister-in-law Louisa, whom he likes
perhaps a little too much. This has nothing to do with Lady
Trentham’s age or her relationship to him, it’s because, as a
Countess, she is the highest ranking woman there, according to the
table of precedence, so she is always seated to the right of the host.

This strict seating plan extends below stairs as
well, so Lady Trentham’s maid Mary gets the place of honor at the
servants’ dinner table, at the butler’s right, even though she is the
least experienced servant in the house. And, like all the visiting
servants, she is called my her mistress’ name when she is below
stairs, rather than by her own.

Gosford Park uses the form of a 1930s English
country house murder mystery, but the movie doesn’t care much about
the murder and neither do we. The murder is in the center of the
picture, but what’s happening around the edges is usually a lot more
interesting.

We see the machinery of a huge
country house like that, and all the procedures and routines that keep it
going. Almost everybody knows what they should be doing and how they
should be acting, and the few exceptions, like Mary and a visiting
American movie producer, allow us to find out exactly how complex and
rigid the whole system really is. All of the duties and
responsibilities of the different servants are very carefully
researched, and it shows.

We also see some very complex family
relationships, both above and below stairs, much of which is just
hinted at. As in most Altman films, information is given but not
emphasized or repeated.

This is a movie which only has its full effect
when you see it more than once, in a way that Altman never would have
done twenty or thirty years ago. But in the age of video and DVD,
people watch movies again and again, and he knows that. Gosford
Park is designed to reward repeated viewings, since some scenes will
appear to be one thing the first time around, but on a second viewing
will reveal themselves to be something very different.

Freddie Nesbitt: Don’t worry, it’s
nobody.

At the beginning of the movie, we see some of the
guests arrive in front of the huge house, and as they enter we expect
to enter with them, but we don’t. Instead, we abruptly find ourselves
entering below stairs, with the visiting servants. We’re in the
engine room of the ship, not on the main deck, and we see the rest of
the weekend from the point of view of the servants. We don’t see
anything above stairs unless at least one servant is present.

This allows us to see, among other things, how
invisible the servants are, because extraordinary things are said and
done in front of them as if they’re just another chair or lamp. I’ve
seen very similar behavior in the corporate world, in fact, but
obviously not to this extent, and certainly not this consistently.

What keeps it all going is not only the economics of
it, that William McCordle owns enough sweatshops to run a huge country
house and to buy his way into an aristocratic family, but the other
thing which maintains the whole structure is that the people involved
all end up having a stake in it, to some extent, even the servants (especially
the senior ones). They maintain their own hierarchies and protocols
just as much as the aristocracy, and they are very aware of the
respect they get because of their position in the house.

Service was a job, and for a lot of people it was a
very good and desirable job, but it was a lot more. It became your
home as well, and, especially since there were few married servants,
it tended to become your family. Many people went into service in
their early teens, like the hallboys who serve the dinner for the
servants, so for them it was a vocational school as well. And it was
all, as we know but they do not, about to end, since comparatively few
people maintained this kind of house after World War II.

And, as in many families or small towns, everybody
knows what everybody else is up to, even if they don’t talk about it.
Everybody knows about Lady Sylvia and her taste for handsome visiting
servants, everybody knows that Jennings, the butler, is a drunk,
everybody knows about Sir William and Elsie, the head housemaid,
everybody knows about Bertha the kitchen maid and her various
liaisons, and everybody knows about Arthur, the gay second footman,
who is always hoping to be allowed to dress Ivor Novello, a visiting
film star (who doesn’t have his own valet), but things are always
worked out so that he doesn’t get the chance.

In this world, for everyone you encounter there is
an appropriate form of address, and an appropriate way to act, and for
every part of every day there is an appropriate way to dress.
The visiting American film producer, who has several
strikes against him (he’s American, Jewish, vegetarian, gay, and he
produces Charlie Chan movies), never succeeds in saying or doing or
wearing the correct thing in any situation, but, being an American,
he’s usually completely unaware of this.

He’s an outsider, like “Opal from the
BBC” in Nashville, and Altman uses him to show us interesting
information along the way, like the fact that breakfast in a house
like that was the opposite of dinner. It was served buffet style,
everybody sat where they wanted, people read the newspaper and it was
all very relaxed.

Many of the major characters (and there are a lot of
them) are supplied with quite a bit of back story, but frequently only
in a comment or two. Most of it is not essential to the “plot,” so
you can absorb as much or as little as you like.

For example, at some time in the past, the Earl of
Carton (who we never meet) wanted one of his daughters to marry
William McCordle. As happened very often (and still does), the Earl
had a title but no money. William McCordle had money, but no “class.”
So, Sylvia and Louisa cut cards, and Sylvia won, so she married him.

Both sisters now regret how this worked out. Louisa
flirts with William, and it isn’t clear whether it ever went any
further than that, but what is clear is that she likes the idea of
somebody playing with her, coaxing her into bad behavior. Her
husband, Lord Stockbridge, the very stuffy ex-Army officer, certainly
isn’t about to coax anybody into anything naughty.

Sylvia certainly doesn’t need anybody to coax her
into bad behavior, she dallies with visiting servants on a regular
basis, if they’re handsome enough. What Sylvia finds she wants,
though, is somebody she can respect, and there’s nothing much (as she
sees it) to respect about her awful, vulgar, middle class husband.

I remember in the 1970s two players on the NY
Yankees decided to trade wives in mid-season. Needless to say, this
was not an option in the English aristocracy, especially in the 1930s.

Mrs. Wilson: Didn’t you hear me? I’m the
perfect servant. I have no life.

Neither group of people above stairs or below, has a
monopoly on goodness, or nastiness, or self-involvement, or lust, or
any other human characteristic. The servants don’t really have much
of a life, though. Not because the masters consciously prevent them
from having one (the masters are generally oblivious to the whole
question, which is in some ways even worse). It’s just because of
what’s demanded of them by the job (or, really, the life).

One of the most delightful scenes in the movie takes
place in the evening, as Ivor Novello (who was a real film and music
star of that time, his music is used throughout the film) sits down to
entertain people at the piano. Despite the fact that this is
obviously why he was invited, all of the guests ignore his playing
almost completely. A film star is nothing to them, and it seems
pretty clear that they like having him there so they can make that
point, to him and to each other.

However, many of the servants, entranced by the
music, creep up to the doors of the drawing room to try to listen
without getting caught.

Constance Trentham: He produces the Charlie
Chan movies. Or does he direct them? I never know the
difference.

The film is beautifully balanced, all the real
unhappiness set off by some wonderful humor. For one thing, there is
a theme throughout of jokes about the movie business. Morris
Weissman, the American movie producer, is always on the long distance telephone,
conducting his
business with the studio and fighting about the casting of his latest
Charlie Chan movie, much to the
disdain of the aristocrats.

The second thread of humor is provided by the bitchy
asides of the women of the family about Mabel, among many other
topics. Mabel is the middle class wife of the Honorable Freddie
Nesbitt. He is there to try to get money and/or a job from William,
mostly by blackmailing him with the knowledge that William’s daughter
is or was pregnant, probably by Freddie himself. Freddie is awful,
and everybody knows it, but he is of their class, and he knows how to
dress and how to act and conduct himself, so they put up with him.

Mabel is one of the people who changes during the
course of the movie (most of them don’t, in fact most of them are
barely affected by the murder), and it’s one of the great subplots, as
she realizes that her husband and most of the other people there may
look down on her (even some of the servants dismiss her, because she
travels without a ladies maid), but she begins to realize that she has
a lot of intelligence and strength that most of them don’t have.

The third, and most obvious, source of humor is the
detective himself, who is a complete ass. He tries, unsuccessfully,
to ingratiate himself with the aristocracy, he obviously has no idea
how to solve a crime, and he is a constant source of amazement to the
constable who works with him. He is probably the only completely
one-dimensional character in the movie.

Only one character discovers who committed the
crime(s) and why, and she never reveals this knowledge to anybody
else. She thinks, quite correctly, that no purpose would be served by
doing so. And, though she doesn’t say so, she is aware that the
murder was only the culmination of many other crimes, none of them
ever punished.

Gosford Park

(2002)
Directed by Robert Altman
Screenplay by
Julian Fellowes, from an idea by Robert Altman and Bob Balaban

 

Cast:

Constance Trentham : Maggie Smith

William McCordle : Michael Gambon

Sylvia McCordle : Kristin Scott Thomas

Isobel McCordle : Camilla Rutherford

Raymond Stockbridge : Charles Dance

Louisa Stockbridge : Geraldine Somerville

Anthony Meredith : Tom Hollander

Lavinia Meredith : Natasha Wightman

Ivor Novello : Jeremy Northam

Morris Weissman : Bob Balaban

Freddie Nesbitt : James Wilby

Mabel Nesbitt : Claudie Blakley

Rupert Standish : Laurence Fox

Jeremy Blond : Trent Ford

Henry Denton : Ryan Phillippe

Kelly Macdonald : Mary Maceachran

Robert Parks : Clive Owen

Jane Wilson : Helen Mirren

Elizabeth Croft : Eileen Atkins

Elsie : Emily Watson

Mr. Jennings : Alan Bates

Mr. Probert : Derek Jacobi

George : Richard E. Grant

Arthur : Jeremy Swift

Dorothy : Sophie Thompson

Mrs. Lewis : Meg Wynn Owen

Mr. Barnes : Adrian Scarborough

Sarah : Frances Low

Renee : Joanna Maude

Bertha : Teresa Churcher

Inspector Thompson : Stephen Fry

Constable Dexter : Ron Webster