Gosford Park
With Eileen Atkins, Bob Balaban, Alan Bates.
US, 2001, DCP, color, 137 min.
DCP source: Warner Bros
A consensus choice for one of Altman’s greatest artistic successes since his Seventies golden age, Gosford Park functions at least superficially as the director’s Rules of the Game,with one character’s admission that “we all have something to hide” offering a gloomier variant on Renoir’s democratic credo “everyone has their reasons.” Reinforcing the comparison, Altman’s film also shares with the French classic a rural estate setting in the Thirties, a prolonged game-hunting scene and an unambiguous emphasis on class distinctions. But Gosford Park ultimately departs from its regal predecessor in its pulpy whodunit yarn, a murder mystery that invites comparisons to Agatha Christie and the board game Clue. It is a dramatic framework that Altman uses less on its own terms than as a means of gradually teasing out the crisscrossing tensions within the estate’s dense network of pampered guests and demure servants. Altman’s trademark ensemble direction, here in particularly voluptuous form navigating the multidirectional activity and labyrinthine architecture of the estate, makes it such that the film’s mystery cannot be fully grasped on first viewing. It is a macabre brainteaser in appropriate perceptual disarray.
Part of film series
Screenings from this program
Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson
Vincent & Theo
Fool for Love
Prêt-à-porter
California Split
Thieves Like Us
A Perfect Couple
A Prairie Home Companion
O.C. and Stiggs
That Cold Day in the Park
Corn's-A-Poppin'
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
The Gingerbread Man
Dr. T and the Women
Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
