Gosford Park - Collector's Edition

Rating:
Summary: Death by Boredom. Death by Water Torture.
Review: Just Death.

I went into this expecting mystery, atmosphere, surreptious class warfare, guerrillas manning the barricades between Upstairs and Downstairs---something to enthrall while I immersed myself in the rich, ribald atmosphere of Edwardian England.

You know what I got? Sheer, ruthless boredom.

This is perhaps the stupidest, most pretentious, most godawful piece of rubbish every vomited out by director Robert Altman, who once upon a time could work a camera (when you need to pay rent, you better be good), but now realizes that his white, middle-class liberal audience would happily eat a turd if he offered it to them on a silver platter, handsomely mounted.

Altman makes a point of criticizing George W. Bush. But at least, in the field he's in, Bush delivers to his audience. Altman throws talented actors like Kristin Scott Thomas, Maggie Smith, and Michael Gambon---and a lotta gorgeous English scenery, including a stately manor home, all of whom/which deserve better---into a cinematic blender, and his "puree".

"Gosford Park" is "Clue" for middle class, pretentious, bourgeois morons. Now hit the "unhelpful" button and go watch it again.



Rating:
Summary: A movie tremendously original...
Review: What I want to say about this movie it's already been said! The actors, the director, the argument! Everything, I mean everything is exceptional! It's delightfull to see all of these actors in their most splendid performances! The murder?! Doesn't make any difference! In the end - and it's only a weekend - it seems that nobody remembers the dead - Michael Gambon in a tremendous performance - It's only a diversion for the rest - Secrets, Lies... upstairs, downstairs... Not very well hidden feelings! THAT is the most important and what makes the movie so good!

In one simple word - Original!

Rating:
Summary: Way too busy and way too shallow ....
Review: This DVD has all the earmarks of somethng that I should have liked .... even critical acclaim .... BUT ... I had real troube tying to build up any empathy for any of the characters and, whats worse, has some real problems in even following the story ....


The DVD basically throws 30 or so people together in an English country mansion for a weekend of pheasant shooting. There are of course the wealthy and the very wealthy with their attendant maids, valets and butlers ... and of course, thrown into the mix are poor aspiring singers/actors and a film director from California who just happened to be both a vegetarian and of Jewish descent. Cute ....


OK so the movie is a whodoneit and it pretty well is a cheap version of the CLUE game, only difference is that in the game it's easier to follow the characters ... in Gosford park there are so many stories and character goodies thrown into the mix I think even the writers got bored in trying to tie all the pieces together....


You want great DVD fare the I suggest you buy the set of The Forsythe Saga .....


Rating:
Summary: An Exercise in Sado-Masochism
Review: Robert Altman used to be a great director who wielded one mean camera.

Now he's become a cinematic sadist looking for a masochistic victim. If you watch "Gosford Park", you're the victim, and Altman is the leather-clad gimp.

"Gosford Park", Robert Altman's self-referential and cleverer-than-thou deconstruction of Agatha Christie's great whodunits, is crammed to its Victorian manor home garrets with enough actors to stage a full-scale invasion of Normandy (and win!), obsessively detailed, and repulsively self-absorbed. This is a strange and decidedly post-modern mixture of all-Plot and no-Plot, a smirking deconstructionist manifesto masquerading as a 1930's murder mystery.

"Gosford Park" doesn't entertain, thrill, or amuse: it bores.

Roughly a million primary, secondary, and tertiary English characters and their servants converge on the remote English manor home of William and Sylvia McCordle (played in desperately work-manlike fashion by Michael Gambon and Kristin Scott Thomas, respectively) for an extended week-end of dining, mumbling, and grouse-shooting, with an extra serving of mumbling.

Our battalion of mumblers, Upper and Lower Class, maneuver around and about the ornately appointed chambers and elegantly manicured grounds of the Victorian manse, wheedling and plotting and whispering and, of course, mumbling. Elderly dame Constance Trentham (played acutely by Maggie Smith, who could do this sort of period dance in her sleep by now, and probably did) wheels whispering about the dining room and parlor of the estate, worrying about status and couth.

The hapless Meredith couple (Tom Hollander, Natasha Wightman, turning in fine roles as middle-class mumblers) are trying to wrangle a deal with the elderly, grumbling, blackhearted Lord McCordle. Lady Sylvia (Thomas) is wan, capricious, fickle and unhappy; Lord William (Gambon) is bellicose, loud, and rugose. Everyone is unhappy. Everyone mumbles.

Downstairs the staff mumble, but in Cockney accents, so whereas the Upper class mumbling is understandable, the soupy Yorkshire-to-Southwark gurgles will doubtless cause you to curse and demand subtitles. Alas, no help is forthcoming, and you'll spend a few minutes rewinding the DVD to try, desperately and futilely, to figure out what that First Footman said. Or was it the 4th Beater? Never mind. You'll be so absorbed muddling through the accents and the mumbling it won't really matter.

There are a number of inevitable collisions between the gallant forces of Upstairs and the stolid and stoic servitors Downstairs as Things Come to a Head, portrayed through awkward pauses in dinnertime chit-chat (read: stilted mumbling punctuated by gasps) and startling revelations during tea-time at the McCordle Gazebo.

None of this makes for an interesting movie. Indeed, it makes for something approximating Hell on Earth.

"Gosford Park" drowns in its own smug self-satisfaction, its endless mumbling, its dry-and-unaffected seminal murder sequence (presented almost as an afterthought), its muddle-headed and moronic Scotland Yard investigator (played foolishly by the great and underrated Stephen Fry, who sinks without a cry in this murky soup), and its anti-climactic "conclusion".

This is not to say that the "Gosford Park" ship sinks without a mighty effort from its crew. The captain may be drunk at the helm, but the acting is terrific throughout, in spite of the mumbling: Dame Maggie Smith entrances as always, Kristin Scott Thomas does wonders with her thankless role, Michael Gambon rages and goes not softly into the dying of the Light, Helen Mirren is an oasis of dignity and desperate reserve, Derek Jacobi carves out precious little slices of the film and makes them his own, and the great Charles Dance and the inimitable Richard Grant do what they can with the material they have.

I will also admit that the world of "Gosford Park" is handsomely mounted---like most dead wild beasts that have been shot and stuffed---and kudos go to Director of Photography Andrew Dunn (who stirred up the bewitching cinematography in "The Madness of King George III" and "Count of Monte Cristo"), set designer Anna Pinnock (who moved on to "Van Helsing") and costume design by Jenny Beavan, ("Alexander") and has about a million Jane Austen treatments under her belt. Everything looks smashing.

Alas, "smashing" isn't the word that comes to mind about the larger work of "Gosford Park". 'Dull' is. For a movie that demands this much of its audience, "Gosford Park" really doesn't seem to care that much about its plot, its characters, or its resolution---and certainly not its audience.

To those who want to see the British class system skewered, buy "Upstairs/Downstairs". To those looking for some ghoulishness mixed in with their rich Edwardian atmosphere, pick up "Clue" or "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes". To those who want to lose more than two hours of their life to a mumbling, plotless, aimless and colorless British costume drama helmed by a director who has seen better days, pick up "Gosford Park". Just don't say you weren't warned in advance. I would rather have someone drive red-hot pokers into both of my eyes than ever watch this vile thing again.



Rating:
Summary: something for everyone
Review: Altman has made a film which appeals on at least two quite different levels. For those who enjoy sophisticated social comedy with a nice mystery plot--folks who enjoy Agatha Christie--this is a winner. The film can certainly entertain one on these grounds alone. It is sumptuous and beautiful to look at, and the characters are complicated in some cases, and hold one's interest even when they are "types" because of the acidulous dialogue.
However, more challengingly, there is certainly a historical-social context which Altman has more than suggested. The only historical character is Ivor Novello, who was a gay actor-songwriter of the 20s and 30s, and it is significant that he brings a fictional gay film director, jewish and gay, to the party. These socially marginal characters, who are tolerated by the gentile aristocrats, are the moral center of the film. They--that is, --and the servants downstairs, whose life is a wretched inverted mirror-image of the hideous stratified social ziggurat we find upstairs.
Consider that Altman gives a precise date for the action: November, 1934. The Nazis had just won their first big election in Germany, and the British Union of Fascists, under Sir Oswald Moseley had just pulled off their first big rally in London. Hmmm. Could the temporal setting be merely accidental?

Rating:
Summary: Sure, There's a Murder. But It's All Done With Style
Review: The murder is the least important element of this movie. For me, the movie is all about style -- English upperclass, country house style with dollops of what it took below the stairs to keep everything running.

What makes the movie work for me are two things: that style is brought to life with quite a bit of wicked (but not malicious) humor; and second, some extremely good acting. These two elements are exemplified in the funny, mannered performance of Jeremy Northam as Ivor Novello, singing Novello's popular and ickily sentimental songs (although Her Mother Came, Too is still amusing). I can't think of a performance in the movie that wasn't first rate, including those by the two Americans, Bob Balaban and Ryan Phillippe. Well, maybe Stephen Fry.

Even the heavy-going plot lines, which could easily have sunk into melodrama, are rescued by the performances of Mirren, Atkins, Watson, Bates, etc. And the bit players also were outstanding. I especially liked the chubby young scullery helper. I just hope she didn't get pregnant...and that she always washed her hands before helping out with the carrots.

Altman, for me, has made so many movies of such varying quality that it's hard to figure out where to place him. I wouldn't put this one in the same league as McCabe and Mrs. Miller or Nashville, but I think it fits comfortably along side Cookie's Fortune, another film I like a lot.

Rating:
Summary: Magnificent
Review: I have never seen the end of an era captured so poignantly. I don't think I will ever forget seeing this film. The scene where the staff is cleaning up and the party is winding down and you can feel an era ending before your eyes, even before the people in the film realize it.

Altman is a genius and it is wonderful to have this movie and the great extras on DVD. Watch the Q&A's with the cast and Altman!

Rating:
Summary: Fine idea, poorly played out...
Review: A fine idea (even the writing credits seem to be based upon various 'ideas'), a throwback to the classic murder mysteries of old, but poorly played out.

A stellar cast of mavericks and newcomers alike is wasted on a script that - despite some excellent dialogue & snappy tongue-in-cheek references - goes on too long, disappearing down too many dark hallways of apparent "intrigue".

The movie is overlong and dull as a result and the revelations and twists are unsurprising. By the end of the movie, you no longer really cares who committed the dark dead (which takes quite a while to take place - too much setting-up of characters and events) or why.

Would've made a fine novel, with the depth to get into the characters, but it is a disappointing movie.

Worth seeing for a magnificent cast who give fabulous performances however, and the camp knowing dialogue.


Rating:
Summary: Less than meets the eye
Review: This is one of those films that one feels compelled to praise at the risk of otherwise being branded a wretched philistine. For reasons mentioned in other reviews, however, it's not at all a masterpiece; there's much less to this movie than meets the eye.