‘What a magic trick’: why Gosford Park is my feelgood movie

8 hours ago 4

Robert Altman called Gosford Park – his take on a 1930s country-house murder mystery – a “Who cares who dunnit?” But he did care that Eileen Atkins, learning to play the sour cook Mrs Croft, knew how far to whisk eggs for ice cream. A woman who worked in houses of the period taught her, though Mrs Croft’s relentless contempt for her “betters” is pure Atkins.

The accurate ice-cream is for a weekend’s shooting party hosted by Sir William McCordle (Michael Gambon), a wealthy industrialist. Servants tend to the gathered guests in their rooms, or toil and gossip below in a network of dim corridors and internal windows. Gosford Park takes place in November but was shot in March, so the previous season’s pheasants were defrosted and dropped from the sky. They are the only fakes in an ensemble cast of real deals.

Even the film’s dubious “Hollywood folk” – a producer researching his own country-house murder, an actor posing as a servant, and the “real-life” Ivor Novello, who admits to making “his living” impersonating his toffee-nosed hosts – enhance, by their interest in raw material, the solid-oak reality of the house and its inmates.

On set Altman’s actors were constantly miked, like in reality TV – a cross between Kardashian and thespian. Not always knowing when they were on camera, they delivered lines both scripted and improvised. This gives the film’s air the texture of air in real life, rich with asides and charismatic mumbling. The approach produced Maggie Smith’s winning, off-the-cuff assessment of a “common little” guest’s evening dress: “Difficult colour, green,” Smith’s Countess of Trentham observes from the bridge table, “mmmm … very tricky.”

Screenwriter Julian Fellowes called these layers of speech a “pillow of reality”. Boy, have I rested my head on that pillow! In an age where you can’t swing a cat without hitting an “immersive experience”, I return to Altman’s real-McCoy immersion. For me, rewatching Gosford Park for the umpteenth time often means purposely falling asleep to it, a sacred timeslot in my home. As I drift off, the film rolls over me like an autumnal weather system. I’m pulled deeper into its rich aural layer, where I regularly catch new, disembodied phrases: “It is muddy here, do watch,”; “Have you seen the monogram?” All the drowsy pleasure of in utero eavesdropping.

In the mornings I usually find I’ve closed the laptop during Novello’s long turn at the piano, the unofficial soundtrack to the murder. Sometimes the screams of the woman who finds the body might rouse me, and there I am again, with my friends in the dark.

The murder demands the arrival of Stephen Fry’s inept detective. Immediately, his tone is off; Fry plays everything for laughs. But this tonal shift is a masterstroke, since it only intensifies the realness of the people around him. He leaves them embarrassed, unsure where to look, as a vulgar genre flick tries to unfold in the middle of their lives. It’s the countess’s underqualified (read “wonderfully cheap”) lady’s maid, Mary, played expertly by Kelly Macdonald, who is the film’s true detective. She pads up and down stairs, at sea in her job but fully at home in Altman’s meticulous, authentic world.

While the men bring artifice into the house, it’s the women who most inhabit the film’s reality. For me, Gosford Park conjures Emily Watson, the housemaid Elsie, jaded and utterly alive, advising Mary to bring a separate jewellery box for the first night (“saves the bother”). See also: Kristin Scott-Thomas as the cruel Lady Sylvia, her hooded eyes staring out of a glaucous oval of night cream, arranging a 1am assignation with the valet Mr Denton (Ryan Phillippe). Wiping down a breakfast tray in the still-room, Sophie Thompson finishes a sentence with one of the strangest but believable noises I’ve ever heard from an actor’s mouth. As Altman said, “I’m looking for a mistake, a recognition of truth.”

What a magic trick, that a film without consequences (“Who cares who did it?!”) manages to be so consequential. It’s partly because you’re not asked to “relate” to the so-called characters, or morally judge them. You’re invited to pay these people attention, to listen to what they’re saying as they disappear through a door. You try, impossibly, even half-asleep, to crane your neck for a clearer view between candelabras, or behind a rack of pressed shirts.

Gosford Park lives eternally in my head as a string of quotations and opportunities for arch comparisons. But it also inspires a certain toughness. This isn’t a cosy world; it’s a brutal one with enviable lighting. In any brutal situation you need to be “doughty”, a repeated word in one of Ivor Novello’s comic songs that echoes around the stairwells, heard by servants and guests, as a murderer steals over the carpet. And as Lady Sylvia concludes, after weighing up Mr Denton’s second invitation for “company” a mere hour or so after the killing: “I suppose life must go on. Unhook me.”