Gosford Park

Robert Altman, Italy / UK / USA / Germany, 2001, 137 minutes

Gosford Park is really a wonderful twist on the formula popularized by TV versions of Agatha Christie novels. Instead of the detective as protagonist, we have a houseful of guests and their servants, while the detective (played insouciantly by Stephen Fry) is utterly incompetent. Though his constable is more efficient at sourcing out suspects and clues, the best detectives are the servants, whose job it is to attend to life’s details.

On the surface, Gosford Park is a classic murder mystery on par with Murder on the Orient Express, but with all the subtext that film lacks. The real story is going on downstairs, amongst the maids, grooms, and cooks who look after the beautiful, spoiled guests.

The McCordle family and their weekend guests are all mired in affairs and shady business deals. They beg the family patriach, Sir William, for money and worry about wearing the same colour dress at dinner. They are horsey and snobbish. All except Ivor the movie star, his producer Mr. Wiseman, and the former glove factory heiress Mabel. Downstairs, there is the rivalry of the cook Mrs. Croft and housekeeper Mrs. Wilson, Elsie the opinionated upstairs maid, and the various grooms and maids of the guests. Like a reverse costume drama, in which staff are often invisible, this film tells its story predominantly through the lives of the servants who make a country manor habitable, rather than the aristocrats who own it. As the murder investigation unfolds, so do the secrets: genteel poverty, illegitimacy, adultery, alcoholism, unrequited love. The class structure is so deeply embedded in this film that when one of the guests masquerades as a valet, it is the servants, not the guests, who are offended.

As is the case with many murder mysteries, virtually everyone has a motive for wanting to kill the victim, and the murderer turns out to be someone unexpected, someone almost invisible, with a motive that rivals a tragedy by Aeschylus or Shakespeare. Gosford Park unfolds gracefully, like the chambers of a great house where there are many places for concealment, but the house, like a servant, does not give up its secret past easily, even by the ambiguous end.

Review by Sarah Artt
Written for EUFS Programme Autumn 2002