Gosford Park Review

"Gosford Park" is a remarkable return to form for seventy seven year old "M.A.S.H.", "Nashville" and "The Player" director Robert Altman, who has already won a number of major awards for the film, including a Golden Globe for ‘Best Director.’ Set in an English stately home in 1932 the film follows the goings on above and below stairs over one busy shooting weekend and, in the best Agatha Christie tradition, includes the obligatory murder. However the film is far less a murder mystery than it is a look at a way of live long since passed.

The film boasts an excellent ensemble cast of top British talent including Michael Gambon, Kristin Scott Thomas, Maggie Smith, Charles Dance, and Jeremy Northam as various aristocrats, with Alan Bates, Helen Mirren, Emily Watson, Derek Jacobi, Kelly Macdonald, Clive Owen and Altman veteran Richard E. Grant as various servants. Altman’s perspective as a curious outsider – an American – means he doesn’t bring to the film the stale and predictable political perspective an English director almost certainly would, instead he lets his cast and their characters show us the absurdities of a lifestyle that involved two distinctly different groups of people, neither of whom could exist without the other.